after ge moved closed the plant near where he works the unemployment rate has been high double digits. the biggest employer in the county by far is the govt. used to be the biggest GE plant in the world.
my grandfather worked there for 40 years. right out of HS. I believe the corporate headquarters used to be there. if he had held onto the company stock he was given he would have been a millionaire. now you past by it and it's a ghost town, but the building is still there. depressing.
Agreed. Droski said so to somewhere in the thread. Never read the book though. I might at some point.
Worth a grab. The newest edition provides commentary up to about 2002, so covers the .com bubble. I'm sure one covering the subprime mortgage fiasco will be out soon enough. It is basically everything you already know: but low, sell high, diversify, invest don't speculate, if you keep "things" (land, gold, etc) make sure it is a very small percentage (like 2% of your overall), maintain a ratio somewhere between 75/25, and don't think you can beat the average (6.5-8%) for any long period of time. It is neat reading about the different things that used to work, but don't anymore. Basically it points out that the second a successful strategy is published, it becomes useless. They talk about how in days of old, the Janurary effect, where brokers would dump their worst performing stocks in December so as to increase their percentages. And those stocks would later rebound for a good gain. So if you bought them in Janurary, you could see good gains by March or so. But once that was published, the ability was lost, as brokerage firms started doing just that, thus leveling off the gains.
It happens, but just not to the level it used to, was the point. It is more of a gamble now than it was. Some article I read talking about moving funds into tax haven (proper terminology?) retirement funds, this diminishing the need for tax loss selling.
I honestly don't think it's all that great of a book for today. I kind of roll my eyes when I meet people who do this for shits and claim they massively outperform. probably similar to you when you meet extremely rich people who use turbotax or something.
the biggest returns you will see now are with thinly traded stocks. still a lot of wealth in taxable accounts. but that's one of the reasons why I suggest muni funds which are only purchased in taxable accounts. also not many other things are down for the year and valid candidates.
I made a note, just because of my lack of knowledge on this subject that thinly traded (and I assume this means not as often traded stocks) would be a good way to go, and my reasoning was that it would be because it removed much of the human, emotional element from the scheme. Not sure if that is solid reasoning, but just something I thought possible.
Except card is a big Dave Ramsey guy. There are a couple of areas where dros and I disagree on the debt idea.
no it just means if a bunch of retail investors decide to sell their closed end muni funds that because the stock doesn't trade a lot the negative effect on the price of the stock would be much much greater than say them selling apple. once that selling subsides the stock's generally recover. another reason is the major hedge funds and such can't take advantage of this because they can't buy enough stock to make it a big enough investment for them, but we can buy $50K worth or whatever and make a quick 10%.