I'm not what you would call an "expert", but I've got a degree in economics, having spent a lot of my college years studying accounting, finance, quant analysis, and other fun things. I also passed CFA level I and studied for CFA level II before getting bored and moving on to programming full time.

My questions are these (and I mean no disrespect, if it comes off like that): what value do you think your tips add for the novice investor above random stock selection? What is your track record? What valuation models do you use? How much analysis do you put into a company prior to investing in them? Do you read all of their SEC filings (including all the footnotes)? Do you use external sources for general economic inputs (e.g. how are you calculating your RFR over any given time period)? If so, what are these sources and what is your reasoning for using them?

can I just reply with this?? http://www.dilbert.com/blog/entry/invest_in_whatever_makes_y...

I have been lurking around hacker news for awhile now and felt this is my chance to chime in with my experience with the market to help out. I have been a successful proprietary trader for 7 years, since I got out of college and now at 30 I am looking to indulge my entrepreneurial spirit full time (there have been many failures!).

Anyway, here are some things I live by:

1) CNBC, blogs, everyone has a vested interest to make you think it is really complicated. Its not - stocks go up or down. 2) CNBC is a joke. In 7 years, they have broken only a handful of stories and if you weren't a full time trader it meant nothing to you. 3) Barrons is the best layman's investment journal there is, and it only comes once a week on the weekend. 4) Invest your money only during bear markets or when others see gloom and doom. Stock pile your investable money and buy only when CNBC predicts gloom and doom (probably 1-2 months out of the year. 5) If you actually want to trade, get to know yourself by reading books that talk about mentality over ways to actually trade. Trading is 95% mental.

If anyone has any specific questions or just wants to know more about me, feel free to email me at logicwins@gmail.com

"avid watcher of CNBC" and "pretty well informed" are at odds. Start reading Denninger, Mish and ZeroHedge and you'll see why.

An upvote isn't enough to express how true this comment is. If your only exposure to the market information is the mainstream offerings, you are like a sheep being led to the slaughter.

I've never gotten anything really tradeable from Mish, but if you want to know what is going on, it is a daily must read.

No kidding, I read an article which compared following Cramer's advice to doing the exact opposite, and the latter outperformed by a significant margin.

Beautiful troll! I almost bust a gut laughing.

The credulous replies are disturbing aren't they.

If I told you I have an account at Interactive Brokers, Zecco, Scottrade, and Sharebuild, frequent EliteTrader forums, and watch CNBC would people be interested in my tips?

I would be hesitant to act on financial tips without a well defined history. This is one reason why I'm a fan of the Covestor model where you can follow a well-documented history.

Having said that, if you can provide some journal of trades that beat SPY, I'd love to get your tips.

If you told me that you watch bloomberg for ambient noise and use CNBC mostly for comic relief or to get frustrated/angry before a hard workout I'd be more interested.

If you told me that you peruse nuclearphynance but that (almost) all forums are mostly crap, I'd be more interested.

I've only just perused it but I don't think a covestor model is that valuable because things like survivor bias and small sample size even with a sizeable history (unless they are very frequent traders, in which case I think there are better places for them than covestor).

I also don't think I would (nor should anybody else) act on any "tips", since to me at least the connotation of the word is that someone tells you a "fact" without you understanding the mechanism. If you don't understand the mechanism, you might as well just go full bore with the survivorship bias and pick the best track record. Related to the requirement of understanding of the mechanism is the idea that you should invest in what you believe to be valuable investment philosophy, regardless of past performance.

Also, I find offers like this generally worrisome.

What amount of money and how much time per day would I need to start making a 10% +/-3% ROI per month in stocks?

Is this even possible?

It depends on who you listen to. I spent a good 2 years post college building upon the foundations of finance, accounting (of all its various stripes), monetary theory, international factor movements, quantitative analysis (read: fairly high-level stats), portfolio theory (risk management), etc. Then you have to learn how to read SEC filings (and foreign versions of the SEC filings), what all of them mean, all the nuanced rules that the FASB puts out (in the form of GAAP) and how they differ from the international standards (in the form of IFRS), entire histories of companies down to the intensely nitty-gritty details...

The list is basically endless. The worst thing about it is that even after all this, something like 90% of portfolio returns can be attributed to sector allocation, meaning that even if you do think a company is great, they might just be the best answering machine company in an age that is on the cusp of seeing smartphones.

This is why you'll often find analysts focus specifically on sectors (or even industries), and only a few companies in them. It takes a lot of time to get enough information about the past, present, and (potential) future of an industry and a company in order to know all the factors to make an educated-enough guess.

In short, you can pick 30 stocks at random and you will probably have returns very close to market average returns. The amount of knowledge (and intelligence) required to guess better than other people is so immense, that unless you're going into financial analysis as a career, I'd stick to ETFs or managed portfolios. With an ETF, you can make bets on sectors, countries, or the entire market, all for minimal fees. People much more experienced than yourself will figure out what the best allocation of companies inside that particular ETF is.

Still, anything beyond a portfolio that is perfectly correlated with average market returns brings with it increased risk. In other words, the more you screw around on the edges without having the years of experience required to know what you're doing, the greater the chance you'll make higher (or lower) returns than the market.

There is some evidence that you can beat the overall market by overweighting ETFs that are trending higher or whose relative strength is higher.

I created a site ( http://ETFtable.com ) to make doing this pretty easy. Sorry for the plug, but I think it's contextually relevant. Let me know what you think.

I put on my skeptical hat when I hear claims like that. I'd have to see extremely solid evidence to believe it.

Nice site! Layout is cool. I haven't dabbled too much in ETFs or tools for researching them, so I'll have to pass on any judgment due to a lack of context. Still, I'm sure someone will find some use for it.

Here are some backtested results of some RS ETF strategies. Specific industry, asset class, and country ETFs just haven't been around long enough to really backtest for long-term out-performance, but these seem to indicate you can beat the overall market with lower drawdowns with an RS ETF strategy: http://etfprophet.com/two-simple-relative-strength-rotation-... http://www.bpas.com/media/HBT/dent_tactical_r3.pdf

Thanks, Nathan. I'll be giving these a look later today!

I just started reading Security Analysis by Dodd & Graham. I heard it was a classic book on investing.

Given what you've said, should I bother reading it if picking at random is going to work out better in the end? Have you read it and can make a recommendation as to its usefulness? In the first few chapters they identified the issue of massive amounts of information, but the book still charges on.

If you do think it's still worthwhile to continue reading it, do you have any suggestions for some introductory books that can help me understand some of the financial slang they use? :)

I've never read Dodd & Graham directly, but have obviously heard lots about it as it is one of the seminal works in investment theory. However, consider this from WP:

>However, in the 1970s Graham stopped advocating a careful use of the techniques described in his text in selecting individual stocks, citing the extensive efforts and costs required to generate superior returns in a modern efficient market. Instead, Graham later suggested the use of one or two simple criteria to the investor's entire portfolio, focusing on results of the group rather than on individual securities.

Investment theory has come a long, long way since the 1930s. Hell, it's come a long way since the late 90s. In the 80s and 90s, some of the smartest people in the world came up with some fantastically complex algorithms (coupled with their generally high knowledge of global trends in various industries and markets) to generate astronomical returns (look up Long Term Capital Management).

Trouble is, Benoit Mandelbrot was right. If you look at any stock chart, you'll see that regardless of the time scale, the ups and downs tend to look very similar. No matter what you won't find a stock market that goes up forever. You won't find a bond market that has high rates forever. You won't find a country that stays in boom times forever. And worst of all, you won't (just by looking at the data) be able to tell when "the big one" is going to hit. LTCM got hosed by the Asian financial crisis of the late 90s, and everyone thought they'd finally found "the formula".

So, in short, to distinguish yourself in the stock market, you need to be good at picking companies (this is the very hard part) AND lucky. My brother (against my advice) started putting thousands of dollars into companies like KERX that were trading very cheaply. He got lucky and quadrupled his investment of $20k. I can guarantee you that if he does the same thing 10 more times, he will get destroyed, and bad.

Time wins out. It always wins out. You can only get lucky for so long before you have to pick correctly on your knowledge AND have a large pile of money to back up your mistakes (which you will make). For example, my former employer (a $10bil asset manager) dropped tens of millions of client dollars into Enron throughout the year they went from ~$90/share to ~$1/share. Despite their intense research, they still didn't see the fraud coming because there was no real way to know. So they gambled and "averaged down" the cost basis for their Enron position and lost nearly all the money they put in. They did the same thing with Washington Mutual on the way down recently.

If I were you, I'd not rely on me for figuring out which books to read. Mine have been mostly editioned texts through college and the CFA texts (which are awesome, but expensive). Search around for finance forums to see what people recommend for the modern novice investor.

I can tell you is: never trust what you hear on CNBC (or anybody who speaks on it) and never trust the financial advice/opinions you read on Hacker News (including mine). The people here are mostly programmers who often have silly, oversimplified positions on economic matters, just like most other people in the world. So go ask around...you'll find some good suggestions somewhere.

Thanks, I'm so green to this I didn't even know what an ETF was! Doing more reading now...

No worries! I'm not trying to scare you off, I just want you to be aware of how deep and murky the pool is before you dive in. Ultimately, all of this stuff is really very interesting and fun to learn even if you don't one day make millions off of it. :-]

Look at it this way: 7% compounded monthly means 125% gains annually. Warren Buffett, one of the most successful long term investors of all time, only managed 18% gains annually. Some newer investors (Joel Greenblatt, Mike Burry) have averaged 30-40% annual returns but don't have the length of track record of Buffett.

No, not possible.

Buffett has stated : "I think I could make you 50% a year on $1 million" http://www.businessweek.com/bwdaily/dnflash/june1999/sw90625...

For him, its really a matter of how much money he has to put to work. This is probably in part why Burry can make the returns that he does, he doesn't have a $200B anchor around his neck.

For an inexperienced individual to make those returns (10%/mo) would likely be more risk taking than alpha generation. It's hard to describe exactly what would be involved in getting to the stage where you could do this reliably (alpha generation) because there are different routes to get there (fundamental, quant, high frequency), but it would likely involve quitting your day job and also likely involve getting a day job that involves asset management. And not the hot-air sales kind like Wealth Management/Private Banking, more like the hedge fund/portfolio manager kind.

What amount of liquid capital would you deem appropriate to have before beginning to "invest" and not play with stocks? I have heard that it is not worth the risk for anything below $18,000.

Same question, only for options.

What percentages of capital should someone in their 20s split investment between bonds/index funds/stocks?

What do you think about ishares vs. ETFs for 8 months to 2 year investments into emerging markets?

Did you get in on any rare earths stocks before China's embargo?

What's your take on them, do you think they've peaked or still skyward from here? A couple stocks I was looking at only a month ago have already doubled (RES.V, HUD.V)

I was expecting "buy low, sell high"

I was expecting buy "citibank", hold for 3 years and sell. :]