Diane Archer on Medicare for All

Selecting a specific financial security isn't entirely straightforward. It's a bit more of a dance; give and take but you lead.

Asking somebody what's the best stock to own is a lot like asking what's the best vehicle to own. I might recommend the 1980's Lotus Turbo Esprit. You may want a vehicle to get to Quimper France from Miami Florida. Knowing that I would suggest sailing Yachts, a private jet, or perhaps booking a cruise depending on your personality and sense of adventure. If instead, you tell me you do delivery of small packages in a dense urban area, I would point you to Cannondale bikes with some off-road suspension features.

So for an advisor to begin to tell you what you should buy, first, you have to decide what you want to do with it.

If you are a thrill-junkie with money to lose and an expectation to win big, you will want stocks that have a normally undesirable high standard deviation of their daily returns.

If you are a stable middle-class worker with a family that has grown a bit too big for you to put all your children through college with budgeted savings alone, you should probably be building a portfolio of blue-chip type stocks that are changing from their growth stage to their income stage. This will give you low-risk moderate long term gains and low taxed dividends at the same time. It's a safe way to achieve your financial needs for future tuition requirements.

It's not easy to really know what you want out of an investment, especially if you are new to investing, because you can't really say what you want till you know what your options are. This is why I said it was a bit like a dance. Still, despite it being difficult you should ask yourself, why you are reading this? What are your innermost secret desires for owning stocks, bonds or other stores of capital? When would you want to go in? When would you want to come out? What growth hopes do you have? What risk tolerance you have? Would you contemplate suicide if an investment dropped to half of its value in a day because of a lawsuit against the company? If your growth goal happened early, would you come out early or "let it ride"? Would you be using it as a better savings account putting in and taking out regularly? How much do you need to get through a year without being forced to sell your investments low because a recession struck while you are in the market?

Be methodical and write down your ideas about investing. Come back and review your notes about every week or so. Talk about your ideas to family and friends and also experts in the field. See what type of conflicting advice you get and then try to get resolution on what is right from unbiased sources.

About the choice for the Forum's profile image.

It's a well known story in finance courses offered in colleges and universities that a challenge was posed where a drunken monkey throwing darts at the stock listings pages of the Wall Street Journal could do better at building a Portfolio than the top paid money managers in the industry. Depending on when you decide to stop the trials is the main determining factor for who's winning. It's about a coin toss between the record of a random selection and the top managers.

The main reason for this comical outcome is commonly referred to as the Efficient-Market Hypothesis; in brief, about 1,000 analysts (minimum) per stock study that stock daily as their only job, so if anything could change the pricing of that company thousands of people would immediately react to it so the price a ticker is listed at is correct at all times. The Efficient-Market Hypothesis can't prevent catastrophic changes to a company, like unforeseen health side effects from their product, failing health of a CEO, legislative changes that alter a market, and so on. It also can't stop big positive changes to a security in a short period of time.

I tried it once with a friend of mine who worked at UBS. I made a spreadsheet that was putting together randomly selected characters of lengths 1 to 5 and the first 12 that were real companies were mine. He laughed so hard at my choices. For 2 months he was winning the competition. For multiple years after that I was ahead, and by a large margin. He got sick of talking about it.

If you currently have a person managing your money and they don't have a legal "Fiduciary Duty" to you as their client, then you cant really trust their motives for suggesting what you put your money into. Generally, the house they work for has a set of products that they want your Financial Advisor to push onto you, and your personal financial advisor may believe they are the best choices, but chances are they aren't. Because of this information gap, you should learn something about picking stocks. Stock Picking is something that most people can do safely and successfully with a reasonable amount of learning and effort.

Also, some people like to say that the Stock Market is just gambling. This is a fallacious statement for a couple reasons. First, in gambling you are generally expecting to loose everything invested or get a big return at every moment; with a stock you are expecting to have a small gain over time and if it's down you can stay in and watch it go back up again or pull out with a small loss. Secondly, in gambling, you are putting your hopes in a truly random variable that is heartless to both the bettor and the house; in the stock market you're putting your hopes in a collection of human beings who are engaged in an existential battle for survival and they care about what their investors think. That's what the normal state is. Sure the sensational stories of debauchery like Enron, Madoff, and other criminal activities are perversions of the system, but just in the USA theirs about 9,000 securities you can invest in and in the last decade their have been about 5 catastrophically dishonest companies. Planes crash, buses hit pedestrians, peanuts kill children and so on, but most of us persevere.

#Lies spread like Forest Fires while #Truth spreads slowly behind like growing a new forest.
Bad #Politics

I'm fully aware that "The Force" is fictional, but it's a good concept. If you've done some fairly serious work in math, you probably know that there are different sizes of infinity. One reason we can never make an impregnable fortress, perfect digital security, or an orderly society is that Society happens in a Countable Infinity and chaos happens in the Uncountable Infinity. They are monumentally different. Lies live in the Uncountable Infinity, and Truth is well within the Countable Infinity.

If you want a personal visceral experience with this, try having a dialogue type debate on a topic you know about with somebody on the internet that thinks you are wrong. Typically, if they are passionately wrong, you'll find that they can produce new false assertions faster than you can attempt to correct them; lies come from thin air and truths come from difficult work. This is why the Dark Side of the Force is more powerful. However, it leads to ruin and eventually human extinction. For the Good Side of the Force to dominate, nearly every member of society needs to desire and practice it. However, most people who are spreading lies think they are spreading the truth. It's a real problem for all of society.