One website I’ve found to be very efficient and dependable is Zacks.com and I’ve been using since 2006. When the opportunity came along to have them as an affiliate, I welcomed them aboard. Zachs is the one site that has become more helpful now than ever especially with the uncertainty of this so-called bubble within the stock market at this time. Their research is outstanding, as well as diverse. Zachs has been around since 1988 and has performed well over that time. According to the site, they’re up an average of 28% each year since their start.

As a premium member you have all that Zachs has to offer including up to date e-mails of stocks that you list in your portfolio. Find out about the latest rating of stocks, up to date information about what’s going on Wall Street, Mutual Funds, options, and ETF’s along with their Research Wizard program that will help you screen and back-test stocks that you’re interested in.

If you’re already a member, that’s great, but if you haven’t been a member before, here’s you opportunity to take advantage of a 30 day FREE trial of Zachs Investment Research premium membership. If after the 30 day FREE trial, you’re not satisfied with what Zachs has to offer, then just cancel it. I’m pretty certain that most of you will continue the great membership from Zachs.com

Click below to get your 30 day FREE trial of Zach’s Premium Membership. See you there!

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This first post will explain the 401k rules that you need to be aware of before borrowing from your account. There’s lots of good points to consider in this article and it’s one that everyone should read before taking such a drastic move.

Ty Coon talks about stock market investing system over at Stock Market Investing Today. In his post, he talks about determining overall market direction and how to start setting up screens to identify stocks for further review.

We all have to start somewhere and Stock Market for Beginners provides insight into the world of the stock market with easy language that a beginner can understand. This site has covered other investing topics like gold investing and forex so as to give a complete investing perspective to a beginner.

If you ever wanted to know more about investing, Saving Cash Tips has a post about how you can learn to invest, and why it’s important. Many folks who lost money in the market over the past couple of years really didn’t know how to invest, and just put money into an account where they expected it to go up forever until retirement. Learning more about investing is a smart idea to protect your financial future.”

If you have, or will soon be leaving your current employer and have invested in the companies 401k plan, you will certainly need to understand the 401k rollover process.

We all dream of early retirement but only some truely make it their reality. At Retire Early Guide you can find posts to help you pay off your mortgage faster, effectively save for retirement, put money away for your children’s eduction and more!

That concludes this edition of The Investing Carnival. We would love to host again in the future. Don’t forget to leave a comment when you visit the sites. Tell them we sent you!

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Why Mutual Funds?
The stock market is generally considered the best investment over the long haul, but one of the riskiest, especially if you’re a beginner investing for the first time. No one is guaranteeing your money and the factors that control the price of a stock can be complicated. The pool of billions of dollars from many people’s accounts can support a top notch investing team to make decisions without the hefty price bill of paying for them yourself. Also, a mutual fund is significantly less work than managing your own stock portfolio. Choosing stocks, watching their prices to buy in, watching their prices to know when to get out, and making sure what was a good investment 5 years ago still is can be a full time job in itself. Many people just don’t have the time or inclination to do this properly. If this is you a mutual fund can be an excellent choice.

What to Look For When Buying Your First Mutual Funds?
The first things you want to do when buying a mutual fund, especially your first ones, is make sure they have a long healthy track record. Look for mutual funds that have been around for 20 years or longer. If they haven’t been able to stand the test of time you don’t need them right now. The stock market has averaged around 8-10% per year annual returns. The mutual fund you are looking at should at least have maintained this return over the last 20 years to be in your consideration. Also, look at the worse years the mutual fund has had and see if you can stomach that kind of loss without bailing out.

The second thing you want to look at is the performance of the current portfolio manager; he will be driving the decisions. You mutual fund broker should be able to fish up where this person has worked prior.

The last note of caution is you want to make sure you are well diversified. At least split your investment money into four fund pools. I like small cap, international, blue chip, and commodity.

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Fresh, easy-to-understand insights into maximizing income while lowering risk. Investing for Income demonstrates the convincing reasons that bond funds are the nearly perfect investment. For the millions of investors who dream of earning high returns without subjecting themselves to stock market risks, this is the ideal book.

Using clear, concise language, it demystifies the bond market, from the basics of fixed income investing through more advanced investment strategies, and return and risk analysis. For ease of use, it lists top bond funds by category and covers how to assess a fund’s management team and select a fund. It also shows investors how to build a strong bond portfolio that complements stock and stock fund holdings.

Click To Purchase

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When you invest your money in bonds it is like you are the banker for a company. You are giving your money to a company in exchange for their promise to pay you back with interest. The interest that you will get paid on bonds that you invest in is variable among companies and there are different bond repayment terms that each company will have.
When you invest in bonds you should plan to have your money tied up for a few years. Usually companies will have a bond repayment period of around ten years, but the good news is you will be able to get an interest check either on an annual basis or a semi-annual basis for the bond that you have purchased. Then at the end of the term the original money that you have invested will be paid back to you.

Usually bonds take a lot of cash to purchase. If you only have a few hundred dollars to invest then you may have a hard time finding a bond to purchase. You will need at least a thousand dollars to purchase a bond but most of the time you will find that you need thousands of dollars to make the investment that you want to make.

Depending on your age bonds are a great way to invest your money. If you are getting older in your investment years then bonds are definitely a great way to invest. You will want to do some research on the company that you are interested in to make sure that they are a stable company before investing any of your money. If the company is stable then you will have a great investment on your hand. You can get a great return on your money without taking a lot of risks by playing banker to different companies.

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Usually when someone is a beginner in real estate investing they will start off by purchasing a house and renting it out. You can use the rent money to pay for the mortgage and even make the rent payment a little higher so that you will be able to see some immediate profit. You can save the excess money up each month or you can apply it to the outstanding mortgage loan to get the house paid off a little faster. There are a few things that you will want to do in order to get started off on the right foot.

One thing that you will want to do is find ways to save up all of the money that you can. You will want to have as much investment capital as you can get your hands on so that you are able to make a sizeable down payment. You may want to go in and talk to your local banker about your plans and see how much money you will be able to borrow. Be honest and upfront about your plans so that if you are denied you will be able to find out the reason why and correct it before you try again.

Since you are brand new to investing in real estate you may want to take a professional real estate investment course. There are usually training courses that are held at your local convention center that will teach you some of the basics that you will need to know. If you get all of the information that you need you will be well on your way to successfully investing your money in real estate.

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6. Margin Calls – This is probably the scariest thing about owning a short position in any company.If the stock you’ve decided to short moves in the wrong way (stock price rises), your broker will insist that you do one of two things. One, deposit more money into your account, enough to cover the purchase price of the stock at the current price. The other choice is that your broker will insist that you sell some of your long positions to cover the margin call or they will do it for you in their own way.

7. Early Sale – If the original owner of the shares that you borrowed decides to that they want to sell the stock, you must replace it — either by finding other shares through your broker or buying it on the open market. Remember all you did originally was “borrow” the shares.

8. Short Squeeze – If you’re new to the stock market then this is a term that you might not be familiar with. It’s a term that is used quite often on Wall Street. A short squeeze is when the price of the stock jumps up in value quickly, causing short traders to “cover” their positions. Which means that they have to buy shares to cover the ones that they borrowed. This typically causes higher prices, which prompts more people to sell and to take profits. This is something that you may never want to get caught in the middle of because of the ferocity of the situation as well as get quite expensive.

9. Properly Covering You Position – You may not even realize it, but you can have a short and a long position at the same time. When you go to “cover” your short position, you need to tell your broker clearly that the shares you’re buying are to cover your short position. If you just buy the share while still having a short position, you’ll have conflicting positions. Many times people are in a rush to cover their position, that they may not even realize their mistake of overlooking their selection, especially online traders.

10. Dividends And Taxes – If you have borrowed and shorted a dividend-paying stock, you will receive the dividends, but you, in turn, must pay the original owner the value of those dividends. Also, should you hold a short position for more than one year, well, tough luck — the IRS still treats capital gains as short-term gains. Ah, Uncle Sam is always reliable!

I hope these ten things I’ve given to you will help you in your trading. If you are new to the stock market, then it’s wise to stay away from shorting stocks until you learned more of the basics.

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Bullion market trades the gold at the major stock exchanges of the world. Investment in commodity market will require the user to get a Demat account, which is used to trade commodities like gold and metals. The Demat account will be associated with your online bank account and the bank will charge certain brokerage amount on the transactions made through this account. Once you have the logon details, you can start trading in gold at the concerned stock exchange of your country.

Investing in gold will require you to study the market trends and the demand of gold in the near future. You can study online reviews, read online journals and also check out Jim Cramer‘s site to get an idea about the gold investment. Remember to invest at the lower levels and sell at the higher price to earn maximum profits. The share markets must be monitored while investing in gold because whenever the stock markets crash or go low, gold prices automatically increase and any fall in the share or equity markets can be the right moment to enter the gold investment. The timing is very important while investing in gold and the right entry and exit timings will determine the amount of profit you make in the commodity market. Gold investment can do wonders, provided the investor take calculated risk and manages his portfolio in an organized manner.

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Typically when you buy shares of a company, you buy at a low price and then sell it at a higher price than what you paid. In shorting a stock you “borrow the share from a broker and sell them at a certain price and at a later time, you buy those those shares at a lower price to return to the broker. There is more to it that just this simple explanation of the process.

1. Risk – There is more risk involved in shorting a stock then there is in buying a stock to go up (long) in value. If you borrow a stock while it’s trading at $20 and it runs up to $100, then you’re out $80 a share. Unlike when you “go long”, you can only lose $20 a share as it falls to $0.

2. Locating A Stock – In the past year there has been a law passed that prevents someone from borrowing stock if you can not locate any available shares. In recent years, a trader would borrow shares that no one had and wait for the price to drop to buy the covering shares, but how can he buy them if no one had any? In this case it was referred to “naked shorts”.

3. Outstanding Short Position – The number of shares of a company held short, it is measured in absolute numbers, and/or a percentage of the float of the stock. Usually if the position is more than 10%-20% of a company’s total shares, it means that the bad news has already been factored into the stock’s price. If you find a company with a large short position, you need to avoid it all together.

4. – Margin Account – To be allowed to short stocks you will need to open what is referred to as a margin account. A margin account is where the funds will come from for you to borrow the stock. Take into consideration that you will be charged from your broker a “broker loan rate” (fee) based on the price of the stock. Also you will not get any interest on the margin account or have it rolled over into a money market account on the funds not being used.

5. Liquidity – Just like I said about an outstanding short position, if a company has too many share outstanding (liquidity) you need to avoid the stock. A stock that is not highly liquid should not be shorted. In this case you may find yourself stuck in the stock where you may not be able quickly liquidate your position.

In a future post, I’ll discuss more stock shorting tips for you.

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We’re having our very first (but not our last) contest here at Beginner Investing!

The contest starts right NOW and ends on October 31 at 12:00 noon EST.

First, the prize….one winner will receive a copy of The Morgan Stanley Guide To Personal Investing.

Actual customer review:
“This is a concise & intelligent primer for those beginning investing, as well as those with some experience who hold trust in the responsible management & guidance of Mr. Gardiner. It provides easily understandable descriptions of markets ranging from bonds, to funds, to options.”

Here’s how to enter:
All you need to do to enter is post about the contest and link to this post. Leave the link to where you posted about it in a comment here so we can keep track of the entries.

Good luck!

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