When it comes to investing, the one advice that gets often repeated is: Invest in blue chip companies. Certainly better than shorting and investing in penny stocks! But how valid is this advice? Let’s take a company that’s solid, profitable, pays dividends and has seen multiple depressions and recessions and is still going strong. AT&T. [...]
If you are looking to invest in passively managed Mutual Funds, look no further than Vanguard. Vanguard offers a wide range of funds with very low overheads. Thanks to Vanguard, more and more fund companies are offering low cost mutual funds. Before Vanguard, funds with 0.18 expense ratios were unheard of. I recently opened an [...]
In 1983 a group of elderly women in a little town in the Midwest called Beardstown, decided to form an investment club called the Beardstown Business and Professional Women’s Investment Club. The meetings were focussed on companies whose business they could understand and relate to. Their methodology was simple. Every member put in $100 seed [...]
For anyone new to investing I always recommended OptionsHouse for their quick trade executions and and their low trade commissions. Having used ShareBuilder, Scottrade, Vangaurd, Fidelity, WellsTrade, OptionsHouse and Zecco, I found OptionsHouse a better choice for a frugal investor. Zecco seemed like a good option when they were offering 10 free trades a month [...]
This is part I of the series, Unconventional Income From Uncommon Stocks. The series is meant to be an absolute beginner’s introduction to uncommon stocks. The focus of this post is on Royalty Trusts. Investing For Income The national average for interest on your savings account is about 0.17%. How would you like to get [...]
ACAT fees are fees you pay when you switch brokers to transfer your assets from one broker to another. Some brokers, to get your business, will reimburse ACAT fees to a certain extent – usually $50 or $75 and most ACAT fees are in that range…except one. WellsTrade. WellsTrade has one one the highest ACAT [...]
Late afternoon yesterday, both Visa and Mastercard, two of the world’s largest payment networks, plunged more than 10% on the proposed debit card interchange fee cap. Visa, which was trading at over $79.16, fell to $67.19 and MasterCard fell to $223.49 from a high of $253.35. So what is an Interchange fee? Say you shop [...]
So you’ve been thinking of switching your online broker. But how does this work? What happens to the stocks you hold? Do you have to sell and re-purchase them? Are there fees involved? Taxes? How to transfer stocks from one broker to another? If you’ve never switched a broker before, fear not. It isn’t that [...]
Banc of America recently started offering 30 free trades per month for certain class of investors. I was going through the site… here, take a look! I can understand if Merrill Lynch was a separate entity. Merrill Lynch is a owned by Bank of America. Do they have to say ‘Powered by Merrill Lynch’ after [...]
I recently signed up for WellsTrade with PMA checking. If you have more than 25K, I think the deal Wells Trade offers is hard to beat. Here’s a short list of things I like: Instant money transfers When I was Fidelity, before I could make a trade, I have to initiate a money transfer, wait [...]
