Tag: basics

Categories
Personal Finance

Happy New Year and Stock Picks For 2009

Happy New Year to all our readers – last year was a tough one in the markets but I can’t complain.  My financial situation is better now than it was last year thanks to some aggressive mortgage paydown.  In other areas of my life – our son is a year older and is healthy, happy (most of the time) and doing very well.  We also celebrated the birth of our daughter in March who is also healthy, happy (most of the time) and progressing quite well.

I also started a new site called ABCs of Investing which deals with very basic investment terms and concepts using 2 short posts per week.  A sample post explains exactly what the top down investing method is.  Alternatively, a bottoms up investing style might be more to your liking.

A special thanks goes out to Mr. Cheap who bought both my son and daughter a share of BMO each and created a DRIP.  A very generous gift and very time consuming as well to set the DRIP up.

So even with the crappy markets – 2008 was a great year!

Stock picks

I entered into a stock picking contest with some other bloggers – who shall rue the day they decided to do battle with Four Pillars!  🙂

Traditionally, the only way to do well with stock picking contests is to swing for the fences and hope for the best.  With that in mind I picked 4 small Canadian oil stocks which have been beaten down quite a bit.  If oil rebounds next year then these stocks should perform quite well.  There are probably better plays on the price of oil but this is the best I could do on 3 minutes of research.  Keep in mind these are pretty much random selections – do not consider this a recommendation or any kind of advice!

BCF.to – Bronco Energy $1.27.  I started watching this stock a few months ago when it was trading at $10 (it’s now less than $1.50).  My Dad saw some analyst recommending it on BNN – great call – down 85%!

HOC.to – Holly Corp  $3.65

TOG.to – TriStar Oil and Gas  $11.41

CLL.to – Connacher Oil Gas  $0.74





The other competitors (click to see their picks)

The Wild Investor stock picks

Zack Stocks stock picks

Dividend Growth Investor stock picks

My Traders Journal stock picks

Where Does All My Money Go stock picks

Intelligent Speculator stock picks

The Financial Blogger stock picks

Million Dollar Journey stock picks


Categories
Investing

Free Educational Stock Trading Videos

I recently found out about a company (INO) that offers free stock trading videos online.  While I’m not into active trading anymore (at one time I had a big interest in it), there are plenty of investors out there who love to trade stocks.

INO offers free online videos which are basically educational trading strategy lessons for someone who wants to trade stocks.  This particular link leads to four different videos by trading experts who give up some of their secrets.

First you go to an intro page where you must register to watch the videos – this involves a basic registration – no banking info or credit info is required.

The four videos available:

Market Wizard Insights – Jack Schwager explains the traits and behaviour patterns that supertraders have in common.

Applying Technical – 90 minute video – verteran market analyst John Murphy explains how he looks at the markets.

Five New Tools for Winners – Jake Bernstein is probably the most prolific writer and researcher of material for today’s individual trader.

The Art of Morphing – Every position is the right position when things go exactly as planned.  If not??

INO TV
Categories
Announcements

Introducing My New Blog – ABCs of Investing!

I wanted to share a new website that I have been working on called ABCs of Investing.  It is a basic investing site where there will be two short and simple investing posts each week.  The idea is for people who don’t know much about investing and want to learn (or even if they don’t want to learn) can sign up for the feed or subscribe by email (new posts will arrive in your email).  Rather than have to read a book or spend hours going through investing websites they can just get a small amount of information a couple of times a week.  A lot of the readers of this blog are fairly knowledgeable about investments already but this site might be useful for those of you who aren’t as experienced.

Help your friends or relatives

Do have any friends or relatives that are pretty clueless when it comes to investing?  Is it hard for you to talk to them about investing?  Maybe sending them to ABCs of Investing will be a way to help them out a bit.  Some people either don’t want to take the time to learn about investments or they are perhaps too scared by all the terminology and don’t know where to start.  Even a little bit of investment knowledge goes a long way – whether someone is a do-it-yourself investor or dealing with an advisor.

One thing to keep in mind with this site is that it is geared towards Americans so some of the posts will not apply to Canadians.  I am considering starting a Canadian version of this site but I’m having a problem with not enough time, so that project will have to wait a while.  Rest assured, most of the articles will be universal in nature so it doesn’t matter which country you live in.

The site is quite new and doesn’t have a lot of material just yet – here are some sample posts.

Ok, that’s all the posts that have been published – but there will be plenty more in the future.  Please go and check out – let me know what you think or if you have any suggestions.  And tell everyone you know to subscribe!  🙂

ABCs of Investing – Learn the basics of investing with 2 short posts per week.