The Bull Hunters Guide

This is the last post for a while to cover the topic of basic investment strategies. In the coming installments, I’ll branch out into more diversified topics and try to get a little more in depth into each one. In the meantime, I hope you’ve enjoyed this series on basic stock market strategies and I sincerely hope that they’ve improved your ability to successfully invest in the market and see good returns.

Please refer your friends to this blog so they also can enjoy a free way of improving their investment knowledge. Now, back on topic: Basic Investment Strategies.

Reinvesting your interest

For this article, I’ll cover a tip that more people need to take advantage of in order to keep the cycle of their investment going. Namely: reinvesting the interest.

First of all, never draw from your portfolio for spending money unless it’s absolutely necessary. You should have a separate savings account for matters such as that, and it’s from here that you draw when you need to travel, or make repairs to your home, or things of that nature. Your portfolio is a long term investment, and drawing from it early is a blow that will strike you much later down the road, with a force magnified many times over.

Moreover, because it’s a long term investment, avoid the trap of seeing the interest generated by your investments as “free money”. Sink it right back into your investments by buying more shares, so that the cycle can continue and that your payouts will grow larger and larger.

Check the balance of your portfolio

Try and keep a schedule going where you regularly check the cash balance of your portfolio, and when it hits a certain amount, spend some time looking around and buy new shares, either in new holdings or more in ones that you already have a stake in.

By treating your investments in this way, you are ensuring that your profits are maximized because the interest will continue to compound over the years (and usually at a rate much, much higher than typical means of savings such as bonds and savings accounts). Your portfolio will thank you for it.

Thanks for hanging around for the 12 week series of Basic Investment Strategies. I sincerely hope you have enjoyed it. Please leave a comment in this blog if you appreciate the effort and I will reward you with plenty more stock market investment strategies.

Join me next week as we start our trek into some more in-depth investment topics: Stock Picking Strategies.

Sean Rasmussen
The Bullhunters Guide
Universal Wealth Creation © 2004 - 2008

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In my excitement the latest release of my Internet Marketing ebook, I managed to totally forget my Bullhunter blog. My apologies! Maybe I can cheer you up with this video on my motivational blog >> It is guaranteed to make you laugh. Now, onto the topic: Basic Investment Strategies.

Underlying stock market needs

In any type of activity, there are always those people who seem to need to “keep up with the Joneses”. If the neighbors buy a new car, they have to buy a new one, and preferably one that’s more expensive, with fancier features. If the neighbors get new golf clubs, guess what? They’ve got to have them as well. No one is really sure what drives this sort of behavior, but it’s obvious that there’s some sort of underlying need for these people to prove themselves to those individuals with whom they are interacting. When these people become involved with the stock market, it’s just a disaster waiting to happen.

The serious investor

How many times have you heard the phrase serious investor used to describe someone who has sunk nearly all of their assets into the stock market? Don’t fall into this trap! The seriousness of an investor is measured by the amount of thought and care they put into managing their portfolio, not the actual dollar amount that they’re playing with. Some people never seem to get this message though. In an attempt to be taken seriously, they just keep on sinking in more and more money, regardless of the potential consequences.

What do you hope to gain by investing?

What ends up happening to these people, inevitably, is that a loss hits them, and they lose way more than they are comfortable with losing. In their desire to look serious or to be taken seriously by others, they failed to ask themselves the question of what they hoped to gain by investing. Some people are okay with a loss of 20% on their investments. Some can even handle 50%. Others might run screaming at a mere 10% loss. All of this is fine so long as you’re honest with yourself about how deeply you want to swim in this pool. Don’t go out further than you’re comfortable with, and you’ll never get into trouble that you can’t get out of.

See you next week for part 12 of Basic Investment Strategies.

Sean Rasmussen
The Bullhunters Guide
Universal Wealth Creation © 2004 - 2008

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Ever hear of those “fantasy sports” leagues? People meet up on websites or even in person to build their own fantasy sports team comprised of all their favorite team members from all the various teams throughout the actual league. Then, every time a game is played in real life, the performance of the players who are involved in each person’s fantasy team are evaluated and an overall value is given to each fantasy team. At the end of the season, the fantasy team that contains the most valuable players is announced as the winning team.

The Fantasy Stock Market

Some people, it seems, like to play fantasy stock market. They do an awful lot of speculating in “what ifs” and it tends to take time away from their actual investing. This is especially true of those individuals who can never seem to let go of a stock once they sell it. We’ve all probably met someone like this. They had a poorly performing stock so they decided to sell all their shares in it. But now, they check the status of that stock more obsessively than when they actually owned it! Even though it can’t possibly affect them now which direction the stock takes, they have to know how it’s doing anyway, they have to know if they made the right choice. What if they didn’t? What if they would have been better off holding on for a little while longer?

Learn To Let Go

Letting go is one of the most important lessons to learn in the stock market. The fact is that you’re going to pick some duds over the course of your career as an investor, and when you do, you need to just forget about them and move on. If you’re constantly looking backwards and dwelling on your mistakes and whether or not they were really as bad of mistakes as you thought they were will prevent you from doing what every real investor needs to do: look ahead to the future.

Stocks Poor? Ditch It!

If you have a poorly performing stock that’s causing you grief, sell it and let that be the end of it. If you happen to come across a report of how it’s performing, fine, but don’t bother to seek it out. You’re just wasting your time. You might as well try to keep tabs on every single stock in the exchange! Instead, focus on those stocks in which you still have an actual investment, and those on which you’re thinking about investing in the near future. They are the areas that are really worth your attention and concern.

See you next week for part 11 of Basic Investment Strategies.

Sean Rasmussen
The Bullhunters Guide
Universal Wealth Creation © 2004 - 2008

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This is probably another one of those common sense tips that tends to be overlooked and swept under the rug in favor of the latest “hot tip” or whatever happens to have come down the pipe. Nevertheless, these tips have been around for a reason: they’re important, and their wisdom bears repeating. This time around, we’re going to talk about the old adage of sticking with what you know.

Get the best results from what you know

You’ve probably heard this advice given most often in conjunction with the exercise of writing, under the pretense that by writing about the topics that one is most intimately familiar with, one can produce the best results. The same applies to investing. If you put money into industries that you don’t know the first thing about, you’re going to get into trouble and fast. Suppose that you open up your morning news paper to the technology section and read about Company X having developed an all new standard for etching circuits onto the surface of a microchip, one that can double the number of circuits of past chips. If you know nothing whatsoever about computer chips, then you wouldn’t know exactly what this meant for Company X. You wouldn’t be able to (accurately) speculate as to what it meant for them in terms of near future stock market activity and your hands would be tied. Everyone knows that following an industry’s developments is one of the best ways to know what’s going to happen in its corresponding market presence, so it pays to invest in those industries that you understand well enough to follow.

Satisfaction from investments

Furthermore, you’ll have the advantage of feeling more passionately about your investments, and you’ll derive a greater emotional satisfaction out of working with them. After all, part of the appeal of the stock market is that it’s a lot more fun than just letting your money sit in a bank somewhere! If you have an investment in a company that you used to work for, for instance, or a company that produces a product you use on a daily basis and feel a personal fondness for, you’ll have more invested than just your money. This isn’t just sentimentalism, either; the more you personally care for a company and its products, the more carefully you’ll be inclined to follow the trends that affect it, and ultimately affect your investment.

See you next week for part 9 of Basic Investment Strategies.

Sean Rasmussen
The Bullhunters Guide
Universal Wealth Creation © 2004 - 2008

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This week, we’re going to cover another one of those “common sense” strategies that nevertheless always seem to be so helpful. The real problem with common sense is simply that: it’s common. It’s always right there, out in the open, so as time passes, people tend to overlook it. A pretty ironic situation, really. In light of that, let’s take a look at one of the bits of conventional stock market wisdom that really needs to be driven home, especially for young investors.

Compounding growth

Like with any other type of savings, compounding growth is more or less the end all and be all of investment. What starts as a 1000 dollar investment that gains 10 percent becomes a 1100 dollar investment. If it hits that same growth again, it becomes a 1210 dollar investment, and then a 1331 dollar one. Simply put, the longer you have your money working for you in some type of investment, the more growth it can achieve.

As such, it is critically important to start investing in the market as early as you can. Young investors need to take a look at the idea of diversification and find some way to balance that virtue with the virtue of having a few core stocks that you tend to keep with you over the life of your portfolio (always keeping an eye on them, of course).

Early means more time to profit

Investing early has another meaning as well: if you invest your funds early in the life of company, they will have more time to spend with that company as it matures and develops. If it goes on to be a successful company, you will have maximized your earnings by investing in them as early as you possibly could.

Remember, the real name of the game here is compounding. Receiving a gain on money that you invest is exactly equivalent to investing that new larger amount. As your initial investment grows, so to does the potential for future growth on that investment. Developing a long term strategy can help you go a long way.

See you next week for part 8 of Basic Investment Strategies.

Sean Rasmussen
The Bullhunters Guide
Universal Wealth Creation © 2004 - 2008

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