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Strategies & Market Trends : Booms, Busts, and Recoveries -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Seeker of Truth who wrote (67606)	8/16/2005 10:55:40 AM
From: Taikun	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 74559

Seeker, You may be right. Aside from one small error in your observation about taxes, because of my persoanl situation. <the optimum strategy may be long term buy and hold> I have learned from your strategy and dutifully own PEY.UN, CNQ, STO and COS.UN, all except STO as long term investments. (STO is calls only) I do think that even though companies evolve even more frequently now many of the original DJIA companies disappeared almost 100 years ago. So, even if you want buy and hold the market might not let you. djindexes.com I understand your point about quality of companies, though. Isn't it interesting that perhaps the biggest trading vehicle of all is the QQQQs? Those pesky tech stocks! I will say one thing, though. If you have your first 1 or 5 or 10 million or whatever, you might be able to afford buy and hold, or you could just hold cash. If you can make your first x million trading, what's wrong with that? I subscribe to several 'trading signals' and one has about an 80% success rate. I leverage that with options and the gains are fine. Therefore, I have decided a hybrid strategy is best for me. I have my LT holds, as described above, plus a trading strategy. David

To: Seeker of Truth who wrote (67606)	8/16/2005 2:39:57 PM
From: energyplay	Respond to of 74559

Brokerage fees - Consider Interactive Brokers. While they do like to have you make X trades per month, there have very low costs per share $0.01 USD with a 1.00 USD minimum. So Even if your strategy leaned toward the longer term holding, this might save some money. IB has several interface options: 1) a simple WEB trader - which is sort of a fall back. 2) Trader workstation - Cool, but complicated and initially non-intuitive. Powerful, with orders like trailing stops, one cancels the other, etc. Also has features like a "Sell all positions" button and "Sell x% of all positions", grouping of orders, etc. 3) Interface to software APIs/ Excel spread sheets for your own computerized trading. IB works very hard to avoid direct human interface - questions and help by email. *********** Trading can be done as a way in increasing investment returns, or as a job which generates money by itself. Making money from trading by itself is tough. Enhancing investment returns a small amount can be learned, and is relatively easy, but requires some time when you buy or sell. Short term, stock prices will bounce around a mean, or stay with in a channel. As an example, if you have a stock which goes will go from around 41.50 to 62.75 in one year, you can make 50%. If you can buy that stock at 40.90, when the actual low might be 40.50. If you can then sell at 62.92 instead of 62.75, you can gain 55% instead of 50% for a few hours work at each end of the transaction. The profit improvement for trades which have smaller gains are proportionately greater, of course. ---More comments later----