Anyone a stock investor?

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Tell us how you approach the market.

I've often wished I had the money to gamble a few thousand dollars on the stock market.

I follow the market in the papers on occasion, the last company I would have invested in was Apple three or four days after Jobs died... a few days ago Apple was the most valuable stock currently being traded.

The only advice I'd feel safe giving anyone who intends on investing their own money however, is never to invest more than you can afford to lose.

A few years ago I was addicted to an online virtual trading game. There's no real money involved, but it was based on real companies. So I'd do the real research and try to figure out which stocks were undervalued, etc.

If you want to practice and/or don't have any money to invest, this was fun:

http://www.marketwatch.com/game/find

I dropped that interest after 6 months and never logged on again.

Diversify and plan long term. Diversify because some asset classes perform better than others in different climates. Invest long-term because you only need the money once you retire, or plan to make a significant personal investment (e.g. education). A stock that grows only four percent a year may not sound like much, but with compound interest can grow 222% in twenty years.You may find something that could offer that return in one year, but ask yourself why the return is that high (answer: to compensate for the extremely high risk).

I approach the market as if its a rigged casino with no endgame, other than money printing by the central banks.

^this. Unfortunately.

Stocks and finance have long been a special interest of mine. I never had any money to invest, though, and ended up majoring in something else in college. I'm a fan of Warren Buffett's investment methods, as spelled out in the Buffettology books. I do however think that Buffett's methods don't work today, because of heavy computer involvement in the market. Buffett depended upon markets being run by irrational humans and their irrational emotions, but now it's all computers to the point that the NYSE floor is vacant most of the time. Institutional investors simply program what they want into the computers, and the computers do the rest. By the way, the market is in a bubble now caused by excessive money printing, look for it to pop within a year or two, barring something like a breakup of the Euro, in which case it would crash immediately.

It's a little hard to explain how I approached the market. (I'm taking a break from stock watching while I build my house and pay down some medical bills.) I studied accounting to find what went into the financial reports that companies put out, then learned how to backtrack that data, so i could read the reports and see what kinds of decisions were being made, which would then effect how the company would perform the following year. For example, if a company was showing, say, a $300k increase in profits, but their sales revenue only went up $100k, and their wage expenses went down $200k, then i knew that 2/3rds of that "profit increase" was an illusion caused by staffing cuts, and with fewer sales staff, their sales were going to suffer the following year.

That's one extremely oversimplified example.