What is dollar cost averaging? A key part of my plan is dollar-cost-averaging, which is basically purchasing a fixed dollar amount of an investment asset on a regular basis. Earlier, I described how I was going to set aside $240 every two weeks to purchase company shares. Plain and simple, that’s what dollar cost averaging […]

I had no cash savings I started my process because, while I had tons of savings in my retirement accounts, I had essentially had no savings that I could use today if I needed to. If something came up, an emergency, or I wanted to buy a car…I had no cash or investments that I […]

For me, this third major area that I use to determine whether to buy a stock is the most exciting. I don’t know what exactly I should call it… Catalysts. The X Factor. The Story. I am looking for an exciting story behind the stock. A unique set of circumstances that make the stock a […]

Technical analysis is when someone attempts to forecast the future direction of prices by studying the past market date, which is primarily price and volume. I had traded in the past based purely on technical analysis with mixed success. The times when I have not been successful was when I had a very short-term holding […]

Fundamental analysis is where you examine the actual business that you are considering buying. After all, when you buy a stock, you are buying a small fraction of the business! You have become an owner of a company when you purchase their shares. If you were to buy a brand new car, you would want […]

Do you remember the “Where’s Waldo” game, where you have to find the Waldo character among a huge crowd of the other people in the picture? It took some time, but eventually you would find him, hidden in plain sight! Before buying a stock, you should find where it is within the market cycle Knowing […]

Diworsification That is a term coined by Peter Lynch, the great portfolio manager from Fidelity. He ran their Magellan Mutual Fund fund from1977 until 1990 when he retired from running the fund at age 46. His fund averaged a 29.2% annual return, which was more than DOUBLE the S&P 500 stock market index, making it […]

You are probably familiar with the expression… “Can’t see the forest from the trees.” If you get sooooo close to what you are looking at, you lose your sense of perspective of where you are. You lose your sense of what is important. This applies not just to life in general, but to how you […]

Saving and investing money can be pretty tough. I know first-hand. Whenever I decided to try to move money from my checking account, into a savings or investment account, it just never seemed like a good time. There were pressing issues that needed to be taken care of first…like getting a nagging issue with the […]

I see this debate all of the time….proponents on both sides raging back and forth about how one is better than the other. Fundamental investors can be quick to say that technical analysis is nothing but squiggly line, voodoo, which has no bearing on whether a stock is going to go up and down in […]