My best investment to date has been IBM. Bought 100 shares at $38/pc, it's now worth $180 a share plus I reinvested the dividends into the stock, so now I have 103 shares.
For $3800, I've made around $18,000. There are a few others too, but I like IBM and think it's a good company.
If I had $40k sitting in a bank, the first thing I would do is take it out and put it in a credit union. You can earn interest on it at-least this way. Take 10k and put it into a high yield, 10 year CD (You can take it out early if you have to have it, but you'll pay a huge fee and may take a loss depending on when you take it out, otherwise, leave it alone and forget about it) This would be a great retirement package to start out with. When the 10 years is up, take all that money and do it again. Reinvest it into another high yield CD. Just keep this going for the next 30/40 years and you may have doubled your money or more. It all depends on what type of CD you buy.
You could do the day trader thing too. Read. Read. Read. Listen to NPR or some other news station that has a Money Market program. Usually they tell you about upcoming IPO's. I made the mistake of not investing in ZipCar for a day trade. I could have made $11,000 in 3 days, but I didn't have the money readily available. Day trading is fun and you can make a lot of money quickly, but it's a high risk situation. You set it up so that you buy X amount of shares when the IPO launches, keep a very close eye on it. Download E-Trade or something on your smart phone and always keep an eye on that stock. Have a stock ticker on your desk, etc. When you feel it hits a good price, maybe $10 a share more than what you paid for it, sell it. You can set up an auto-sale too. For example, you can buy 1000 shares of Apple for $10 each. Auto-sell it when it reaches $15 a share, or even $20 a share. Make your money. You might kick yourself because the stock could even triple or more after you sell it, but that's the risk you take. I think as long as you really do some good research into the stock you want to buy, especially a new IPO, you will make the right choice on what to do with your money.
Groupon is coming out with their public shares. It has made a lot of buzz. Google tried to buy them for like $1 Billion last year, now they think they are worth $10 Billion or something. I don't recall the exact numbers. This would probably be a really good day trade start out. Drop $5000 on day one of the IPO release. Keep an eye on it all day. It will fluctuate, that's normal. Sell it the next day or when you feel it. So far, my gut has always been pretty damn good, and I kick myself for not going to investing school and becoming a trader. Oh well.
Google, Amazon, Apple are all good companies, but they are huge also. Huge companies like to collapse at any given time. I would say Google is probably the better choice out of the 3. Apple just lost Steve Jobs, and is losing its market share in the smart phone field and tablet. Google is taking over it with its Android OS and devices. They are about to launch their own version of "itunes" type software, which is good. Everything Google touches seems to turn to gold. Their stock is pricey though, and it wont change soon. Do a 2 or 3 year share price graph chart on them. Anything further than that is just expected honestly.
So, lets say you invest in a 10k/10year CD, you invest another 10K in a stock you have done plenty of research on. This leaves you with 20k. Maybe you drop 15k on a new BMW M3 or something cool, or even drop it on a house. You are still young, now is honestly the best time to buy a house. Make that extra payment a year and pay your house every 2 weeks. You'll have it paid off in no time and for cheap too. Then in 10-20 years you no longer have a house payment. More money for you to enjoy and travel or something fun.
No matter what you do, I would personally keep $5000 in your account. You never know what might happen and you may need some money quickly. Investing in stocks can be good, but your money is tied up for a few days, or weeks. So you'll want to keep something handy. Maybe even buy a safe for your house and keep some money in that too, just in case, but don't tell anyone except your parents or someone you can trust that wont kill you for your key or combo lol
And after all this, it's still a gamble. That's how stocks are. The Global economy is fucking stupid nuts right now. You have to really look into a lot of different aspects. How was the recent unemployment rate? It went down, which is good and usually stocks do better on news like this. However, you have the whole Europe debit crisis which also can effect stocks and usually makes them drop. There are just so many factors when investing yourself.
You could just give $10,000 to a stock broker and say "make me the most amount of money" and he might, or he may not. Depends on how good he is and the resources he has. Remember, the stock market trades in milliseconds. Those people have huge servers and software dedicated to making money. So don't foreget about that too. You'll just have to pay them a fee (usually a percentage of what you invest and make)
A+ post, would read again. :tup:
I wish I could just buy a house. Sure I could find a 200k'er which would be really tiny and probably in a sh*t neighborhood. More realistically a decent house on Long Island would be around 400k. Then tack on the second highest property taxes in the nation and you have an endless black hole of money drainage. My job pays nowhere near enough to fund a house right now unless I just keep saving for the next 5 years.
I certainly don't want to drop $1200 a month on an apartment. Though it would be nice getting away from my parents and living on my own, that's A LOT of money that I could be saving for a permanent residence.
What about mutual funds? Better/worse than a CD?
edit - Groupon seems to be public already and hasn't been doing well?
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