Does anyone here invest in stocks?

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Best to buy individual stocks once you have a retirement portfolio setup.

Otherwise, you're just gambling. Your mind will just be watching numbers all day. If that's your job, ok, but I doubt it isn't. Most people try to explain trends and analyze them. However, the retirement investor doesn't look at it that way.

The earlier you start your retirement portfolio, the ease you will be in the future. There is only so much time.

Oh joyous day, the semantics of gambling. As always, best to start by defining your terms. Since generally the aspect of standard forms of gambling (cards, roulette, lotteries) that cause them to be frowned upon is their negative expected return (over time, you expect to lose money), I would not put buying stocks in the same category. The expected return on stocks is positive as a general rule, and so I would not call buying stocks gambling.

I'm not sure if the same is true for day trading given transaction costs and the psychological biases which may cause us to be more likely to buy and sell at times that lose us money on the whole.

People say gambling because you can fall into the trap of "buy high, sell low" strategy. You're constantly looking for trends and watching the news.

Unless you work at the company, you are likely buying the lowest class shares and the last to know what happens to the portfolio.

In the event you do know what's going on, you can be cited and jailed for insider trading.
 
As of now i'm going to be buying shares. Sorry, I didn't know which terminology to use xD

I'm just going to be doing what my Dad is going to have me do at the moment.

Also, with the odds thing, Vegas would always have the same odds, but i'm under the impression that educated/informed decisions would give you higher odds than what you find find at Vegas at least... lol. If you know what you're doing and make educated decisions, then that'd probably be much better than just straight up gambling at a casino. I get what you guys are saying though.
 
As of now i'm going to be buying shares. Sorry, I didn't know which terminology to use xD

I'm just going to be doing what my Dad is going to have me do at the moment.

Also, with the odds thing, Vegas would always have the same odds, but i'm under the impression that educated/informed decisions would give you higher odds than what you find find at Vegas at least... lol. If you know what you're doing and make educated decisions, then that'd probably be much better than just straight up gambling at a casino. I get what you guys are saying though.

Know that trading has fees associated to transactions.

Are you going to do this in a taxable or retirement account?
 
People say gambling because you can fall into the trap of "buy high, sell low" strategy. You're constantly looking for trends and watching the news.

Unless you work at the company, you are likely buying the lowest class shares and the last to know what happens to the portfolio.

These are negative aspects of buying individual stocks, but not things that would make me think of gambling.
 
It's gambling.

For example, I know that a company is developing a drug that while not a cure for cancer, has extremely good prospects.

At the same time I know that every major investor has a bunch of advisors (doctors, pharmacists) who told them about this drug, as such today's price of this stock reflects the interest of all the major investment players.

So, is this stock undervalued or overvalued?
 
Outcome of your decision (in this case buying a particular stock) that is more likely to be affected by chance than other factors.

Ok. In that case, day-trading would be considered gambling, but not in a harmful way, so it's not of much value to call it that. We're not really gaining any insight by the comparison.
 
Thinking of getting into Options, is this a mistake? Been reading about them for a couple weeks, anyone with personal stories/exp?
 
I've lost money on every single stock I ever bought into. Not that I've done a ton of it.

Be cautious about what you invest in, OP.
 
I've invested a little money in indexes and I picked two companies to get a few shares in for the long haul.
It doesn't feel like gambling, but we'll see what happens when I retire.
 
Any opinion on VMGIX?

Figure it's better for a few k to sit in there instead of in my "savings" account earning %0.1
 
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