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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.

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Given the current state of the economy, you might be asking yourself if right now is the right time to be investing in real estate. With the third edition of Getting Started in Real Estate Investing as your guide, you’ll quickly discover how a combination of commitment and caution can help you make it in today’s market.

Designed for investors who want to get started in real estate, but don’t know where to begin, this reliable resource will help you break into this fast-moving field and build equity the right way. Getting Started in Real Estate Investing, Third Edition addresses everything from selecting the right properties and becoming a landlord to using the proper tax strategies and finding the right professionals to work with. It also outlines issues you must be aware of in light of recent events, including the best ways to finance your real estate investments, considering the status of mortgage financing, and new requirements that may be thrown at borrowers.

The new edition is updated to include information on:

* Surviving in the post-bust housing market
* Picking investments with the new credit realities
* Looking ahead to future housing booms
* Reading the emerging housing trends

Written in straightforward and accessible style—with a focus on residential and multifamily properties—Getting Started in Real Estate Investing, Third Edition also contains helpful information that will allow you to analyze your financial ability to buy and hold real estate as well as avoid potential pitfalls.

In order to excel in real estate investing, you need to start by defining what you want to do and how much risk you can afford. But ultimately, success depends on making informed decisions about where and when to invest, and Getting Started in Real Estate Investing, Third Edition gives you the tools to achieve these goals—even under the most difficult market conditions.

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Investing Online for Dummies is an invaluable resource for those who want to take advantage of the timely nature of the Internet for online investing. Author Kathleen Sindell covers all the bases for the online investor including setting up stock screens, selecting mutual funds, fishing for IPOs, and online banking and trading. This book is loaded with links to investment resources on the Internet and also includes a CD-ROM with demos of various investment tools and popular shareware programs. Highly recommended for online investors.

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Learn to Earn gives you the expert guidance you need to make the right start. Lynch and Rothchild cover the gamut on investment fundamentals and principles, from choosing stocks, to picking a broker, to reading an annual report. Learn to Earn reveals how to decipher the stock pages and how to evaluate the pros and cons of the five basic investment vehicles —savings accounts, collectibles, houses or apartments, stocks, and bonds. Yet, there is much more to investing than just the principles, and there is much more to Learn to Earn than just the fundamentals. Opportunity comes in many forms, from many sources, with many histories. Brimming with stories and parables, Lynch and Rothchild also explain:

* Why the world as we know it would collapse without investors . . .
* How capitalism, from the time of the American Revolution on, has shaped the past, and how that affects us today . . .
* How Coke, Campbell’s Soup, Ben & Jerry’s, Microsoft, and other big companies got started, who gets rich from them, and how they got that way . . .
* How to know the real story behind the price of a stock

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Want to make the right investment decisions in an uncertain market? This concise, practical guide gives you smart, actionable strategies for saving your money and meeting both your short- and long-term financial goals. You’ll see how to safely accumulate wealth, consolidate and protect gains, and make the best investment allocations in troubling times.

*Get your finances in shape — manage debt, assess your insurance, improve your credit score, and create a safety net
*Understand investment vehicles and accounts — from money markets and annuities to mutual and exchange-traded funds to stocks, bonds, commodities, IRAs, and more
*Make effective asset allocation decisions — know your risk tolerance, diversify your holdings, and rebalance your assets
*Save for retirement — provide for potential long-term care expenses, allocate your assets, and minimize your portfolio risk
*Live on your investment earnings — make Social Security work for you, get the most from your pension, take stock of your IRAs, use your taxable investments, and more
*Take care of others — help adult children or elderly parents with large expenses and see how to preserve your assets to pass on to your heirs

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A DRIP is a program run in-house by a publicly listed company. They are often offered to employees of the company, but they are also open to external investors who can meet the companies minimum share threshold to participate – usually this threshold is quite low.

The benefit of DRIP investment is that you can start with a very low volume of shares, and gradually increase your shares over time. You usually set a fixed cash amount that you will use every month to buy more shares, and this can be set up to be automatically deducted from your bank account – in essence, it is a forced savings system. The strength of a DRIP lies in the fact that any dividends paid by the company on your shares are automatically reinvested, and this has a compounding effect on your number of shares over time. Many companies also offer shares to participants in the program at a reduced rate, and of course you pay no brokers fees if dealing directly with the company!

Although it might not suit day traders out for short term gain, a DRIP is a great tool to have in your arsenal when building a long term portfolio.

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Chasing a stock is a common mistake you need to be aware of, or your portfolio will take a beaten. This is when a stock had some good news come out and you missed the information when it was first released. In other words, the stock price made some good gains and you didn’t take advantage of the situation. I’ve seen stocks jump in value by over 30% and watch other traders try to guess at if the price would come back down temporarily so they could jump in. As the price goes up, they try to stay near the low end of the trading range, hoping for the pull-back. When the pull-back does come, it comes in the from of profit-taking from other trader and investors that got in on the initial news.

This can also take place over a period of a couple of days where the stock price jumps as much as 100% or better, only to have it come back down to levels of the original price before the move up.

Just because the stock price has moved up in a relative short period, doesn’t mean you should jump in for a quick gain. The traders that do that are very experienced in investing and this practice should be left for them to do. Any stock that you are planning to get into should be one that you’ve researched. You should be very familiar with it’s balance sheets, as well as other financial information in regards to the company. If not, take some time to check out a stock market site for information. You can never do enough research.

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Investors are becoming a lot more independent these days. With the stock market sinking and soaring from day to day, retirement plans becoming less certain, and a longer life expectancy in retirement, more people are looking for some control over their investments. If you’re one of them, Investing Online For Dummies, 6th Edition might be just what you’re looking for. The Internet brings a world of investment resources to your desktop, but how do you find your way through (more…)

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