I don't follow anything because I'm not entirely sure what anything means. I don't have a lot of capital but I'm more interested in learning the business and grinding up. So making decent returns isn't a problem for me, it's just learning to return something lol

I have sent you a PM.

Are you meant to know all this stuff when you've just finished high school? (Actual question)

The better phrase to use is "rolling 5 day period" since there is never a reset unless you don't day trade for 5 straight days.

Is it possible for me to enter in a bunch of limit-on-close orders with Interactive Brokers and then specify that I only want a maximum of, say 3 of 6 orders filled no matter how many orders meet my buying criteria?

Has anyone watched any of IB's webinars? Are any of them useful/mind expanding with regards to their platform?

Right, so if I open a position on monday, tuesday and then thursday, the next monday I can open 1 more, and a further position on the tuesday etc.?

Bolded part: I am 90% sure you can close the position same day? I may be misinterpreting your statement but this seems to suggest you cannot.

A day trade is a trade that is opened and closed on the same day. So if you buy on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday you can sell everything on Friday if you would like to do so but not incur any day trades.

Hey all,

I'm pretty new to BFI. I've made a few bucks from poker in the past couple years and want to start learning some basics about investing. I have a basic question or two:

To start, I'm going to put some money on TDameritrade, USAA, or some other online brokerage. I am aware of the importance of diversification. I have been looking at Google finance while considering how I'm going to make sure I have a diverse portfolio. I didn't really know where to start, so I looked at the various market sector summaries. These range from basic materials to healthcare to technology etc.

I assume that stocks in some sectors generally have a higher beta than stocks in other sectors. Hence, it would make sense to buy stocks from different sectors to lower their stand-alone risk. Though I only checked a handful of stocks from each of the twelve sectors, different companies in the same market sectors had a surprisingly wide range of betas. I expected most energy companies to have low'ish betas and most technology companies to have high'ish betas, but they seemed to be all over the place. This seems to somewhat invalidate my idea that diversifying throughout different sectors would be a good way to lower the volatility of my portfolio.

Is there a better way to search for different types of stock according to their beta other than by market sector? Is beta the best characteristic to look for while considering how to diversify? Am I giving it too much emphasis? I assume there are many other indicators of risk as well, but for now I'm trying to keep this process relatively simple until I learn more about it.

Any suggestions/feedback is appreciated.

Thanks,
LR

i think you're pretty much on the wrong track.

if you want to learn the very basics i highly recommend this page:
http://www.fwallstreet.com/blog/how-...a-business.htm

read all the posts from the bottom to the top. it's nothing earth-shattering, all very basic but i think it's good to understand stuff like this before you start talking about stuff like beta

a quick brag but in reality beat post to say i have now passed all 15 of my accountancy exams - woo hoo!

only 1,000 hours of work left to do till i am a chartered accountant.....

Thanks for the advice. I'll read them all and post again in a week or two with some new potential strats.

I'm sure this has been answered before but...

I'm in the process of applying for mortgages at some local banks. I've played poker professionally the past 3-4 years with no other source of income. I have tax records that show that I've made 50K-100k every year. Should I still tell the loan officers I play poker professionally or tell them something like online consultant? Only looking to buy a house for 150-175k and could easily put 50k down if need be.

bumP?

Hello there, and sorry : a little tl;dr.

I have a little question about day/swing trading. Don’t think that I have to create a new thread, so here we go (please forgive my bad English):

A friend of mine began to day-trade a year ago. We both have a master degree in Finance. Most of our courses were about financial markets, so we understand how it works (regulation, post-trade logistics, financial actors, blablabla), but we didn’t learn anything about trading (we are supposed to be back/middle office managers).

On August 2008, he deposit about 9 K€ and started to trade without any money management nor specific analysis on the French market (stocks of CAC40 exclusively). On January 2009, he had something like 13 K€, and stopped trading until end April 2009. He start trading again on May, after adding 5 K€ to his 13 K€. Today, his “bankroll” is about 25K€ (and of course he want to put more money on it, haha).

Some other information :

• He never use technical analysis. He started focusing on BNP, SOCIETE GENERAL, CREDIT AGRICOL (French banks), just following their daily/weekly swings, reading some news, etc.
• Before reaching 13 K€ on April, he never leverage (not sure if it’s the correct term?) his positions. When he start using it, it was always between 1.5 and 2.5 (max position was like 25 K€ * 2.4 = 60 K€ on SOCIETE GENERAL).
• At first, it was 90% day trading, now it’s about 90% swing trading (holding positions for 2 to 5 days).
• 14 months of trading, without any particular knowledge, and never 100% in front of his computer (school or professional training, more or less like a – relatively cool – full time job).

And now, my questions, pretty simple : is it a massive heater ? Just "luck" ? Is it because of the financial crisis (link to CAC 40 : 2008 and 2009) ?

I'm going to follow his steps in a few months, with ideally 20-30 K€ to start with. Was wondering about this, and some other stuff (ie other questions, soon !)

T'anks, all.

If anyone here has been successful in creating internet marketing websites and would be interested in teaching/coaching me how pls pm (obv I will pay if u are legit). Im bored and want something new to work on in my free time besides poker.

What is the implied volatility of a stock? I was trying to read up on implied volatility based on options premiums, but I don't understand something. If you see a $70 stock and it has a $4 put and a $4 call, why is the implied volatility $8? Why are you adding the two premiums together. This doesn't make sense to me. Can someone shed some light on this topic?

1. how much $ do you need to invest in a hedge fund? would small timers like me with 10k not be able to invest in a hedge fund?
2. wouldn't a profit participation fee in a hedge fund encourage hedge fund managers to take excessive risks unless they also lose money in the same proportion when the hedge fund loses money?

Hedge Funds are generally a minimum of $1m - they need significant buying power to scale enough.

On the second point: yes, most HF's (and other companies that manage your money for a cut) have incentive to take massive risk as they get take a cut from your profit but don't from your losses.

How do you get dividends from an ETF? (E.g. you have $10k in a large growth ETF and get quarterly dividends of about $25. What happens with these little amounts?)

edit: ETF's seem like a hassle compared to MF's so I'm comparing this one aspect.

How do you mean? An ETF is nothing more then a mutual fund that is traded on the open stock market. It pays its capital gains and dividend no differently then a mutual fund would.

Whether you choose to reinvest the dividends is a choice you make with the brokerage, if the ETF allows it.

Well you have to pay commission on trades. It seems that would totally change what you do with dividends instead of reinvesting them. But what else can you do with them?

The dividends are the same as dividends on stock.

There are also ETF's that keep the dividends and reinvest it internally.

How do you get dividends on stock?

It's deposited into your brokerage account.

Okay, so presumably it doesn't have a minimum balance, since it might just contain little amounts from dividends, right?