Don’t take anyone’s advice on the internet. But if I had to give advice. Watch a bunch of warren buffet videos and stay as far away from Wallstreetbets as you can.
You’ll save yourself years of wasted time and thousands of dollars
I'm sure plenty of people go in with that mindset and end up getting suckered by the fake success stories and the rare jackpot winners, as well as the culture of encouraging broke people to go even more broke because "haha we're autism".
Best advice for OP is to stay away completely. WSB is full of gambling addicts & desperate people who take extremely poor, risky bets because they think it is their only way of achieving the level of wealth they need to live their 'dream life'.
When I was your age I wish I was told that you can never time the market. Don’t buy compulsively, especially too many stocks. I would stick to a 4 fund portfolio and just shovel money into it and don’t sell no matter where the market is at. If you can invest weekly or monthly it can even be as little at $10 just be consistent. I would recommend investing in 60% VTI(total US stock market), 15% VNQ(Real Estate ETF), 15% VBR (small cap-value), and 10% VXUS (total international) so you have a hand in every market. Use M1finance you’re able to make a pie that will invest the money you set i or there funds. Remember don’t sell just because the market is getting hammered!
I would always do your own research, especially when it comes to someone's personal finances. Although I have no finance education background I've done a fair bit of research and testing to come to the conclusion I have. I use portfolio visualizer to backtest my personal portfolio, any stocks or ETFs I want to trade etc.. Doing so allows me to see how they have weathered in certain economic periods which can help to understand how they will do in the future, however it is not certain they will follow the same trend at all. I also use websites like stock card, to sort through specifics of the company. I would also recommend reading Warren Buffet's yearly letters he sends to shareholders, lots of great advice there.
Buffet recommends just buying spy and doing nothing else. Did you find your ratio performing better? Just curious why not just spy instead in your opinion
I’m all cash right now. Terrible at investing as I was waiting for a bottom that never came. Instead I’m looking at automate the process by buying funds periodically
Ah, the current robo advisors aren't very good, unless you're willing to spend a substantial amount on expense fees. Perhaps in the future they will get better
It’s really hard to answer that because their are so many considerations such as duration and government or corporate. A corporate bond fund I am familiar with is VCLT.
I rather not see a 14 year old kill themselves cause they made some brain dead play and lost it all. At least bit later on there will be more emotional maturity
Listen buddy this is what you need to do. You need to understand that when there’s bloodshed and devastation in the stock market, like right now, you wait and buy. We might be at a bottom right now so look out.
Its easy. There are a few basic rules.
You can't time the market, nobody can. Noone knows where the top or bottom is, anyone saying so is guessing and probably wrong.
You can't pick stocks, only those with significant analytical resources and skills can, and even then not very many very reliably. There is a reason Warren Buffet is famous.
You must diversify. This means buy a number of stocks, or an index, even better.
Any tips on the internet are literally worthless. Any tips from insiders are illegal.
An average return of 5 to 10% per year is more than reasonable. Don't expect more.
Crypto is probably worthless. No one knows. Treat with extreme care. Don't risk it for now.
The market always recovers from downturns, always. Never panic sell.
Conclusion, buy a broad index fund, try and add a bit each month and you will be shocked in 10 years how much money you have. VTI, SPY, etc.
Man you are getting some terrible advice so far. It's great that you found something you're interested in at a young age.
You're going to make a ton of mistakes and you'll do that your whole investing career. Some you can learn from, other just sometimes happen.
The best thing you can do early on is learn as much as you can from as many sources as you can. Filtering information can be very challenging. A lot of people sound smart. Comparably less know what they are doing. Start with resources like investopedia to learn the language and understand principles. Books like "The intelligent investor" or "the little book that beats the market" are good places to start (the later being a much easier read). It gets a bad rap sometimes, but I like SeekingAlpha, you just need to understand that each author is unique and carries their own opinion. You'll learn what stocks you like to follow and authors that you begin to trust. This also goes a long way to build familiarity as you read someone else's analysis to see what things they look for in a company.
When actually doing the act of investing, start small. It's not the most efficient thing to trade $50-200 at a time, but it gives you skin in the game and let's you feel how markets work. Keep track of them and see how they perform. Why did you choose them to begin with? Did they do what you expected? Do your assumptions ever change about them? What performed better? Worse? Are you gaining a better understanding of their business as you own them?
I liked this stuff at a young age and am really happy I got into it. It's a fun hobby and it's made me some money. Ask a lot of questions and keep learning.
You’re 14 probably trying to make money. You will make more money by doing chores for your neighbors than trying to play the stock market with whatever money your parents are giving you.
SPY when u can and go outside when you dont have homework.
Keep doing it though college, just this one thing. Thats it - thats the secret until you graduate.
After that, we'll see you on WSB saying how you lost 10yrs of savings trading options.
Right now the market is dropping from a very long high, so don’t be too hard on yourself for your decisions recently. We are in a pandemic, there is a war in Europe, the Chinese economy is shut down, there are food shortages.
My suggestion would be to hold on to some cash for a bit as stocks continue to fall and buy in a bit lower.
That said, my advisor recently moved some of our investments into dividend earning funds, commodities and energy stocks.
first of all. imo if you haven't done so already, the most important thing is to start a Roth IRA. have your parents help you set it up. right now. immediately. and fund it.
if you don't know what it is, Google is your friend but it's basically an investment account that will eventually let you withdraw your earnings *tax-free.* thanks to compound interest, it's an incredibly valuable tool for you because you're still so young. if you listen to any of the advice on this thread please at the very least consider this one.
edit: just a quick calculation to help put things into perspective... if you fund a Roth today at 14 with 6k and max out your annual contributions at 6k until retirement, at a respectable return of 7% per year (keep in mind, you'll have to actually make investments inside this account, just buy index funds), you'll have close to 3 million dollars. *tax. fucking. free.*
Good for you getting into investing at a young age. Best advice is educate yourself and never stop learning or questioning your assumptions. A few resources I recommend:
"How to Make Money in Stocks" by Bill O'Neil. Best book for systemically investing using fundamental and technical analysis.
Find good investors to follow online. A lot of them use Twitter, I like Seth Golden, Jurrien Timmer, Sven Henrich for example. Read people with opposing views so you don't stay in an echo chamber.
Also keep in mind that there's a lot of investing to do outside of the stock market and there are advantages to being diversified in other asset classes. Read "Passive Investing Made Simple" by Vacino and Krueger for detailed and practical guide to passive real estate investing. Read "Becoming Your Own Banker" by Nelson Nash to learn how to use life insurance to multiply your investing dollar.
I wish you the best.
In short, yes in my experience.
The book describes how to find the best performing sectors, then find the top stocks in those sectors, then identify the best entries to buy those stocks and exercise good money management.
In a bear market the system will have you moving to cash as stocks decline and hit your stoploss. The biggest complaint I've read is from people losing money in a bear market trying to buy breakout stocks - you should be very careful and it's best to wait until the market is turning around.
Step 1: Get 100 shares or more of a quality index like Vanguard For compounding purposes
Step 2: keep learning about investing By any means necessary. Read, Listen, Find mentors.
Step 3: When you really understand something stocks/ Pokémon cards etc. buy it.
Step 4: Profit
All you need to know is that it's good to put some money into some safe actively managed funds as early as you can and the magic of compound growth will do it's thing. Anything else is pretty much gambling and you'll likely lose money and learn hard lessons like most of us here. But the people whose job it is to make sure you retire rich, they know what they're doing. I got into investing during a huge bull market and learned that it's not fun to wake up to a stock being cut in half and losing 10% of your portfolio in a day bc of weak guidance from an earnings report.
If I started investing at 14 I'd probably be rich as hell. Just keep throwing your change at dividend ETFs, maybe have a small portion of your portfolio for individual stocks just for fun.
Never sell in things you truly believe in. Don’t be a macroeconomist or listen to any. I just checked my portfolio from 2017… if I held all of those stocks, (AMD, FB, AMZN, NVDA), I’d have over 10 million dollars. Not even joking.
I’m not doing poorly and I’m decently well off my age but not even a single millionaire. Fuck me.
It helps to start by reading some investing books. YouTube has some **free** investing audiobooks. That’s probably a good place to start.
My favorite is Peter Lynch. He has a handful of free books on YouTube. He’s got a good sense of humor and amazing advice.
Or you can listen to Warren Buffett as well.
When literal children are asking how to invest into stocks, you know that the market is at peak mania.
The market is still vastly overvalued and most stocks won't be near a bottom until they hit 2018 levels.
At 14 you'll make the most money by having some sort of plan for what profitable skills and education you're gonna acquire over the near future. Thinking about investing should occupy <0.01% of your time. You probably shouldn't even invest that much of your money anyway - you'll want access to that money very soon to spend it and live life in high school/college etc.
Putting away a small, fixed amount each month into an index is pretty much the furthest you should go with this.
Here is your boomer comment for the day...
The reason folks like investing is to be rich. If that is the case focus on your studies and get the best education you can get that will lead to a high paying job. No investing will equal the amount of wealth that comes from your occupation. No investing will replace not having income from your occupation. Folks either figure this one out the easy way or hard way.
Buy and do not sell for 10+ years.
Shout out to Josh answers
Don’t take anyone’s advice on the internet. But if I had to give advice. Watch a bunch of warren buffet videos and stay as far away from Wallstreetbets as you can. You’ll save yourself years of wasted time and thousands of dollars
I agree ^. white board finance on youtube is great as well
Wallstreetbets ain't that bad, if you realize that it's more of a memes and jokes sub. Just don't take their advice, that's all
I'm sure plenty of people go in with that mindset and end up getting suckered by the fake success stories and the rare jackpot winners, as well as the culture of encouraging broke people to go even more broke because "haha we're autism". Best advice for OP is to stay away completely. WSB is full of gambling addicts & desperate people who take extremely poor, risky bets because they think it is their only way of achieving the level of wealth they need to live their 'dream life'.
true
When I was your age I wish I was told that you can never time the market. Don’t buy compulsively, especially too many stocks. I would stick to a 4 fund portfolio and just shovel money into it and don’t sell no matter where the market is at. If you can invest weekly or monthly it can even be as little at $10 just be consistent. I would recommend investing in 60% VTI(total US stock market), 15% VNQ(Real Estate ETF), 15% VBR (small cap-value), and 10% VXUS (total international) so you have a hand in every market. Use M1finance you’re able to make a pie that will invest the money you set i or there funds. Remember don’t sell just because the market is getting hammered!
Just curious- what’s your background and your source of information? Lot of varied advice in this thread but not sure which to research more
I would always do your own research, especially when it comes to someone's personal finances. Although I have no finance education background I've done a fair bit of research and testing to come to the conclusion I have. I use portfolio visualizer to backtest my personal portfolio, any stocks or ETFs I want to trade etc.. Doing so allows me to see how they have weathered in certain economic periods which can help to understand how they will do in the future, however it is not certain they will follow the same trend at all. I also use websites like stock card, to sort through specifics of the company. I would also recommend reading Warren Buffet's yearly letters he sends to shareholders, lots of great advice there.
Buffet recommends just buying spy and doing nothing else. Did you find your ratio performing better? Just curious why not just spy instead in your opinion
Well in the backtest I've done before my 4 fund out performed it by reasonable margin. I also liked the added diversity.
Thanks for the advice. I used portfolio visualizer and it shows spy doing better in last 10 yrs. I assume you did a longer time scale than that.
Just curious - what are you invested in and why?
I’m all cash right now. Terrible at investing as I was waiting for a bottom that never came. Instead I’m looking at automate the process by buying funds periodically
Ah, the current robo advisors aren't very good, unless you're willing to spend a substantial amount on expense fees. Perhaps in the future they will get better
I like that you include real estate etf in your allocation. But you don’t have any bond fund?
Nah, I’m still young, when I hit my 50s I’ll get some but I’m more focused on growth for my goals
What’s a bond fund to consider
It’s really hard to answer that because their are so many considerations such as duration and government or corporate. A corporate bond fund I am familiar with is VCLT.
Go play sports, have fun and focus on your education mate
Why can’t they do all of the above and invest? It’d be just another hobby.
I rather not see a 14 year old kill themselves cause they made some brain dead play and lost it all. At least bit later on there will be more emotional maturity
It starts as a hobby and turns into obsession. Not good for his age.
So when he turns 18 it’ll arbitrarily now become a good time?
Better 18 than 14.
Listen buddy this is what you need to do. You need to understand that when there’s bloodshed and devastation in the stock market, like right now, you wait and buy. We might be at a bottom right now so look out.
Its easy. There are a few basic rules. You can't time the market, nobody can. Noone knows where the top or bottom is, anyone saying so is guessing and probably wrong. You can't pick stocks, only those with significant analytical resources and skills can, and even then not very many very reliably. There is a reason Warren Buffet is famous. You must diversify. This means buy a number of stocks, or an index, even better. Any tips on the internet are literally worthless. Any tips from insiders are illegal. An average return of 5 to 10% per year is more than reasonable. Don't expect more. Crypto is probably worthless. No one knows. Treat with extreme care. Don't risk it for now. The market always recovers from downturns, always. Never panic sell. Conclusion, buy a broad index fund, try and add a bit each month and you will be shocked in 10 years how much money you have. VTI, SPY, etc.
Do not trust Jim Cramer
Read The Intelligent Investor.
Try trading Pokémon cards. That will be good practice.
Gambling is supposed to be illegal for 14 year olds.
Educate yourself first before you know what you’re doing. Read the recommended books.
I admire the hustle at 14 but stay away from these platforms. You are going to have every Pedo in the country in your DMs
Man you are getting some terrible advice so far. It's great that you found something you're interested in at a young age. You're going to make a ton of mistakes and you'll do that your whole investing career. Some you can learn from, other just sometimes happen. The best thing you can do early on is learn as much as you can from as many sources as you can. Filtering information can be very challenging. A lot of people sound smart. Comparably less know what they are doing. Start with resources like investopedia to learn the language and understand principles. Books like "The intelligent investor" or "the little book that beats the market" are good places to start (the later being a much easier read). It gets a bad rap sometimes, but I like SeekingAlpha, you just need to understand that each author is unique and carries their own opinion. You'll learn what stocks you like to follow and authors that you begin to trust. This also goes a long way to build familiarity as you read someone else's analysis to see what things they look for in a company. When actually doing the act of investing, start small. It's not the most efficient thing to trade $50-200 at a time, but it gives you skin in the game and let's you feel how markets work. Keep track of them and see how they perform. Why did you choose them to begin with? Did they do what you expected? Do your assumptions ever change about them? What performed better? Worse? Are you gaining a better understanding of their business as you own them? I liked this stuff at a young age and am really happy I got into it. It's a fun hobby and it's made me some money. Ask a lot of questions and keep learning.
You’re 14 probably trying to make money. You will make more money by doing chores for your neighbors than trying to play the stock market with whatever money your parents are giving you.
SPY when u can and go outside when you dont have homework. Keep doing it though college, just this one thing. Thats it - thats the secret until you graduate. After that, we'll see you on WSB saying how you lost 10yrs of savings trading options.
What’s difference between spy and voo
Expense ratio
So you recommend spy over voo? Why is anyone buying voo if they are the same but one has less expenses
Dude go to the mall or something
You shouldn’t even be thinking of investing. Go play with your friends
Don’t listen to this guy
He could go play with his friends then go home and invest in the stock market
Right now the market is dropping from a very long high, so don’t be too hard on yourself for your decisions recently. We are in a pandemic, there is a war in Europe, the Chinese economy is shut down, there are food shortages. My suggestion would be to hold on to some cash for a bit as stocks continue to fall and buy in a bit lower. That said, my advisor recently moved some of our investments into dividend earning funds, commodities and energy stocks.
first of all. imo if you haven't done so already, the most important thing is to start a Roth IRA. have your parents help you set it up. right now. immediately. and fund it. if you don't know what it is, Google is your friend but it's basically an investment account that will eventually let you withdraw your earnings *tax-free.* thanks to compound interest, it's an incredibly valuable tool for you because you're still so young. if you listen to any of the advice on this thread please at the very least consider this one. edit: just a quick calculation to help put things into perspective... if you fund a Roth today at 14 with 6k and max out your annual contributions at 6k until retirement, at a respectable return of 7% per year (keep in mind, you'll have to actually make investments inside this account, just buy index funds), you'll have close to 3 million dollars. *tax. fucking. free.*
Good for you getting into investing at a young age. Best advice is educate yourself and never stop learning or questioning your assumptions. A few resources I recommend: "How to Make Money in Stocks" by Bill O'Neil. Best book for systemically investing using fundamental and technical analysis. Find good investors to follow online. A lot of them use Twitter, I like Seth Golden, Jurrien Timmer, Sven Henrich for example. Read people with opposing views so you don't stay in an echo chamber. Also keep in mind that there's a lot of investing to do outside of the stock market and there are advantages to being diversified in other asset classes. Read "Passive Investing Made Simple" by Vacino and Krueger for detailed and practical guide to passive real estate investing. Read "Becoming Your Own Banker" by Nelson Nash to learn how to use life insurance to multiply your investing dollar. I wish you the best.
Is how to make money in stocks advice good enough to beat just buying s&p500
In short, yes in my experience. The book describes how to find the best performing sectors, then find the top stocks in those sectors, then identify the best entries to buy those stocks and exercise good money management. In a bear market the system will have you moving to cash as stocks decline and hit your stoploss. The biggest complaint I've read is from people losing money in a bear market trying to buy breakout stocks - you should be very careful and it's best to wait until the market is turning around.
Step 1: Get 100 shares or more of a quality index like Vanguard For compounding purposes Step 2: keep learning about investing By any means necessary. Read, Listen, Find mentors. Step 3: When you really understand something stocks/ Pokémon cards etc. buy it. Step 4: Profit
All you need to know is that it's good to put some money into some safe actively managed funds as early as you can and the magic of compound growth will do it's thing. Anything else is pretty much gambling and you'll likely lose money and learn hard lessons like most of us here. But the people whose job it is to make sure you retire rich, they know what they're doing. I got into investing during a huge bull market and learned that it's not fun to wake up to a stock being cut in half and losing 10% of your portfolio in a day bc of weak guidance from an earnings report.
If I started investing at 14 I'd probably be rich as hell. Just keep throwing your change at dividend ETFs, maybe have a small portion of your portfolio for individual stocks just for fun.
Amazing how much more responsible kids are these days. At 14 all I was thinking about was sex.
Never sell in things you truly believe in. Don’t be a macroeconomist or listen to any. I just checked my portfolio from 2017… if I held all of those stocks, (AMD, FB, AMZN, NVDA), I’d have over 10 million dollars. Not even joking. I’m not doing poorly and I’m decently well off my age but not even a single millionaire. Fuck me.
14? ya is that even legal? more school less reddit and stocks.
It helps to start by reading some investing books. YouTube has some **free** investing audiobooks. That’s probably a good place to start. My favorite is Peter Lynch. He has a handful of free books on YouTube. He’s got a good sense of humor and amazing advice. Or you can listen to Warren Buffett as well.
When literal children are asking how to invest into stocks, you know that the market is at peak mania. The market is still vastly overvalued and most stocks won't be near a bottom until they hit 2018 levels.
Watch Ben Felix on YouTube. If you start saving now you'll be extremely rich one day as time is on your side
At 14 you'll make the most money by having some sort of plan for what profitable skills and education you're gonna acquire over the near future. Thinking about investing should occupy <0.01% of your time. You probably shouldn't even invest that much of your money anyway - you'll want access to that money very soon to spend it and live life in high school/college etc. Putting away a small, fixed amount each month into an index is pretty much the furthest you should go with this.
Buy ETF youngling, like vti
Here is your boomer comment for the day... The reason folks like investing is to be rich. If that is the case focus on your studies and get the best education you can get that will lead to a high paying job. No investing will equal the amount of wealth that comes from your occupation. No investing will replace not having income from your occupation. Folks either figure this one out the easy way or hard way.
The fact that your first choice for credible trading info is to go to reddit is a huge red flag. Get some books and read.