The Best Stocks to Watch

The best stocks to watch for next week are........  Who frickn knows.  What a week in the market. There is so much ging on.  Please be careful to learn before you burn your money up in the market.  Find a strategy, at a low cost to you and work with it.  I am going to follow Bank of America this week and see if it stays under 10 dollars per share.  As a matter of fact.  Make a list of all of the companies that the USA is backing, or "Owns now", and watch what they do for a week or two.  Look at the 52 week highs and 52 week lows in the stock.  That way you can see how high it got over the last year and how low it got as well.  Pick a price to sell.  Don't get greedy, if the stock is at $10 and it goes to $15 you made money.  You have a capital gain of $5.  You have to pay 15% capital gains tax on that $5 that is .75.  You made $4.25.  You follow?  So if you bought 100 shares at $10 per share you spent $1,000 your $1000 went to $1,500.  You made $500 minus short term capital gains tax (Fed & State) about 20%, You made $400 bucks. Getting greedy means you let it get to $20/share and forgot to sell and it droped down to $5. Now you lost -$500 bucks where you could have made $400.  You got it?, good.  I am not giving investment advise I am just saying that we can make money in this market but do not get greedy. 

Churning: Same Money Different Product

There are so many ways that investment professionals get paid.  They get commissions from many different products as well.  Most all of these practices are legal and ethical.  There are some that are not.  Sometimes you will get an advisor or insurance agent that will keep investing the same money over and over and over again.  This is called churning.  It is a way for advisers to continue to make a commission on the same money by taking the money that the client gives them and putting it in an insurance product or investment product.  Then after a period of time, the advisor takes that same money out of that product and puts it into another product.  The advisor just made two commissions on the same money.  sometimes taking clients out of products is the right thing to do.  In today's times there has been a large amount of panic selling because of the economy.  There has been a big push for customer service.  There has been interest rate reductions on certain products.  So it is just a feeding ground for investment and insurance people to have the opportunity to churn products that they have already sold within the last 6 to 12 months.  I am not saying you should buy and hold no matter what.  I do not agree with that strategy.  It does not work for everybody.  I am saying that you must look at the incentive behind why an advisor all of the sudden wants to get you out of a product that they just sold you 6 months ago.  

You can avoid this by asking your advisor or insurance person a few questions:  1.  What is your commission on this transaction?  2.  What was it the last time we moved this money?  3.  What are my costs associated with moving the investment?  4.  What are my benefits?  The advisor will have answers  and you can believe or not believe his or her responses.  One way to know if an adivsor is NOT trying to churn, is if you have already had this conversation the first time you invested the money in the first product.  Honest advisors usually tell you upfront that if it dose not work out we will move it to something else down the road.  They will also volunteer the information about how much they will make on each transaction.  I am not recommending any investment of any kind, I am just saying ask questions before you make fast knee jerk reactions in an economy and market place like the one we are all living in today.

TAX Deadline

It is a big deal to file your taxes.  Do not delay file today.  No later than 12:00 midnight.  The IRS will not forget about you if you do not file.  It will not go away especially if you have to pay.  It's okay, we have all gone that way.  So, just give them what they want.  File today.

Surprise

Is there any surprise that the market is starting off down today.  There shouldn't be.  It is a simple game of make a profit take a profit.  Who has time to day trade?