That would be excellent! We’re looking for input on which night. We have one person that suggested Fridays.
Fridays would be fine with me. The only night I would have occasional trouble with is Thursday.
Everybody okay with a Friday?
@wandrson do you want me to schedule something on the calendar or do you want to schedule it and call it a class so you will get credit for it?
Yikes! You may be paying too much!
Vanguard average index fund expense ratio: 0.13%.
Most of my personal assets are in Vanguard index funds; however, I have found the offerings in company 401k programs to rarely include Vanguard. Indeed I had one where the s&p 500 index charged 2%!
In my experience the 0.6% was among the best to be found in the offerings at the time I was looking.
I’m good with Friday as well.
2 Likes
Ugh. That reminds me. I had one that started with great reports and a reasonable expense. The management company was sold. The new reports were considerably leaner, the expense increased, and what they charged had to be calculated. Before my departure they had stopped providing enough information to determine the expense. Fun times. It is wise to keep a close eye on the company sponsored things.
I would be interested only if it covered more than just “stock picking.”
I have been investing for a long time, but as I get older, my tolerance for risk is less, though you can’t tell looking at my portfolio…
Yeah, my hope is to learn things all about stock investing, including things like “when to move investments from stocks to bonds” and “when to move from stock investment A to stock investment B.” I’m sure in the course of things we might learn all about fees, place orders, put orders, stock shorting, etc. that wouldn’t be about particular stocks but investing in general.
I submitted a request for the Lecture Hall on Feb. 5 at 7 PM. Walter Anderson has volunteered to talk about some investing strategy models. Please attend and we may get an interest group formed. Drop me a line if you are interested but unable to attend that day.
Self fulfilling prophecy… https://ca.news.yahoo.com/fearing-lean-times-u-companies-tighten-purse-strings-063332690--sector.html
It’ll be interesting to see how this plays out. An extra $15-30 per week less spent on gas is sure to show up in people’s bank accounts, and that will offset a lot of belt tightening in some areas. That said, it’ll take some time for people to feel confident about large purchases. I’m thinking that we’ll see a bit of a surge in small items, clothes, dining out, small electronics etc.
I’ll say what my investors said when they looked at my stocks, “That’d get me fired if I did that with a client.”
That being said, the object is to make money. (Not to break even.) So, you might not necessarily follow some advice from the investment advisors… they are paid to diversify, whereas your goals are to make money.
My $0.02. Spend it wisely.
I’ve always looked at the stock market like Las Vegas, only with much better odds. There are companies that are extremely speculative, like betting long odds, but the payoff is very good if you win. There are relatively safe bets that pay off most of the time but there aren’t any guarantees.
I have a friend that didn’t want to take any chances with his retirement account from his job. He knew someone that put all of their money into a stock (somewhere, no, I don’t know who or what) and lost all of their money. So he put all of his retirement in guaranteed bonds making 2%-3%. Now that he’s retired he doesn’t have much money and had to take another job.
I met someone a few years ago that proved to me that you can get educated about a company’s financial numbers and have a good chance of buying stocks that will either increase in price or pay off in dividends so that your investment will grow. I’m told that the market typically grows at near 10%-12% effectively over a long period of time. Even if you make half that at 5%-6% it beats the bond market or a bank CD at less than 1% nowdays.
This is tonight in the Lecture Hall. Hoping we have a good turn out.
Thanks for being here tonight, guys we had 6 people turn out including Walter and I. Walter talked about setting up a statistical model to test stock picking data using past data from online. The programs he suggested were “R” or Python. We are going to try to set up a model using data on the Dow Dogs strategy and the Little Dow Dogs or Dow Puppies strategy. Here is a link to the Wikipedia article on the Dow Dogs stock picking strategy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dogs_of_the_Dow .
The short version is that the Dogs of the Dow stocks are the 10 Dow Jones Industrial Average stocks who pay dividends and whose dividend payment is the largest percentage of their share price. The Small Dogs of the Dow or Dow Puppies strategy picks the 5 lowest priced stocks out of the Dogs of the Dow. These are re-evaluated once a year and changed as needed.
We are working towards getting a Stock Market interest group. Future topics might include numbers used in stock analysis such as EPS and P/E ratio. I envision playing a stock trading game on paper similar to fantasy football; “Fantasy Stock-trading” that might help learning to pick stocks and form stock strategies.
I requested a classroom for next Friday Feb. 12 and again Feb. 19 at 7 PM to 8 PM. The Lecture Hall has a class scheduled next week so we will be in the Conference Room on the 12th. We will be back in the Lecture Hall on the 19th.
Perhaps playing the stock market game would be a good way to start? Allow yourself(ves) a reasonable budget of monopoly money and ‘invest’ for 2 or 3 months.
We’d have to set up rules for the stock game such as how much everyone starts with, what is allowed to be traded (ie. only NYSE? or stocks only but not futures or options?), and how much we would be charged for trade/broker fees when we buy/sell? We might start really simple and change the game as we learn more.