Stocks and Mutual Funds

[Phoebe]

Do you have any stock tips for me, Scrooge McDucks? I need to do something related to "retirement" as if I wanted to have money to live on, which means buying some type of stocks or mutual funds. I'm out of ideas, other than, you know, water? I like water companies for some reason - like, we all need water, and they're somehow monetizing its delivery. It's kind of gross and yet, undeniable.

I really like the Pax World family of funds that offers various "socially responsible" investment options, and a much wider range of them than they did when I first began looking into them long ago. There are index funds, of course, but some companies, I just don't want them having even a dime of my money despite the relative meaninglessness of the tiny amounts I have to invest.
Also a fan of Selected Funds and Dodge & Cox.

I have no other tips. However, my tips aren't all bad - I have about a 70% rate of "good guessing" where the 30% means massive losses, but they are made up for by the 70% of massive gains on better guesses. It's definitely guesswork. I barely know how to interpret the items put in the "stock screener" in my highly scientific and informed process.
I will screen out like 1000 stocks and reject 950 because I have literally never heard of the company, and that makes me nervous. Let the mutual fund manager deal with those, right? I wait until something like Microsoft or McDonald's is very low and then buy a lot of it, or I pick something like "drug company I keep having to buy the products of because they work" and ride that train to the station. I have no idea what I'm doing but my performance is much better than random, or I should say, better than the indexes, so figure that out. I should start an investment fund with this type of expertise. Hey, weren't we going to do that here? I thought we were going to do that! What happened?

[Tahlvin]

Sorry, I don't invest in individual stocks anymore, just mutual funds. And when it comes to the retirement funds, I work with an investment advisor rather than winging it, since that's what I'll have to live on at some point. I do some playing around with non-retirement investments, but it's usually in industry-targeted mutual funds, and in industries that I'm familiar with, usually from work (tech, health care). I like the idea of socially responsible mutual funds, and their returns are starting to make them a good choice for serious investment, but haven't jumped into any just yet.

[Kyle]

What Tahlvin said.

[Phoebe]

I was able to find almost nothing that appealed except Dollar Tree; seems like a reasonable time to invest in Dollar Tree so there you go. Let's see what happens.

EDIT: I have already made the monies! I should be a day trader. But I will sit on it for years until trying to figure out when the heck you SELL stuff, as that remains mysterious to me.

FURTHER EDITS: It occurs to me that at the current payoff rate for my guesses, I would make more money being a day trader (which is in fact what my cousin does, very successfully) than I am making going to work. But I like working. Still, someone else could do my job and probably do it better than me, and then I could trade stocks all day. Suppose I could make, say, a running average of only $250 per day? Not every day, but on average, accumulating that much. Would also pay no different tax rate on that income than I do right now, apparently. Really?? That's freaking bizarre, no wonder we have problems in this country. I wonder how much of a pain in the ass it would be, for tax-calculation purposes, if I started doing this on the side just to see if my prediction is accurate or crazy.

[Mando]

I don't day-trade . I would just muck it all up..I assumed there were transaction fees or something like that to make it difficult so that the little people could not win big.

My employer has a good 401K match so I put my money in there. In every category the top performers have the same stocks in different amounts, but still it's all Alphabet(Google), Apple, Microsoft DollarTree, CVS, Coke, etc...

A friend at work is buying bitcoin (SHIBA) and he bought in at 0.00000854 per coin. 3 months later it is at 0.0000770. He can't wait for it to be worth a penny.
So his 10K is worth 90K now.

There is a waiting list for SHIBA

[Phoebe]

I'm not sure how this works universally, but many brokerages have free online trading of stocks. Then you get to the question of taxes, and I guess it depends if it's a retirement account, and what kind (e.g. Roth). There are the short-term and long-term holding taxes, but none of them are higher taxes than what I would normally pay on income.

Bitcoin or its various iterations would be an amusing investment if you could in fact quickly recoup your initial outlay and then leave the rest laying there just to see what would happen. However, I can't keep track of all that or predict it, and I assume it's just as likely the whole thing will collapse. I don't know what currency criminals use, nor is it easy to say this or that currency is a currency for criminals as opposed to any others, but my understanding is that the better things go for crypto, the better for drug traffickers, and I hate drug traffickers. Similar reasoning behind other stock selection processes/"socially responsible" mutual funds. E.g. please do not invest in oil companies that deliberately kill people and raze their lands.

[Phoebe]

Here's another interesting thing: when shopping for bond funds, you find out who runs these things, and in one case it was some joker who has given hundreds of thousands to support Rand Paul as a candidate! Goodbye! In another case it was some joker who felt the need to inform the "linked in" world that he has never written a check to a Poli Sci major and such majors are useless. I smirk to myself lightly, thinking about how wrong he is likely to be, and how unaware of that fact he is. Goodbye! I need a stock screening tool that actually provides USEFUL information for a change, like where did the fund managers - the actual ones too, not just the one who's named at the top of the list - go to school and what did they major in? I found myself one who is a woman who has been in this field for decades and majored in Classics, so there was a winning horse for the money. I still need others. Where shall I find this without having to spy on these people?

[Phoebe]

My intricately devised and wildly idiosyncratic value stock screener last month gave me this #1 prospect, Paramount global, so I bought it. Stock price kept slumping but I was like, girl, believe in your maths and patterns! So I kept it and now:

"Shares of Paramount Global jumped Tuesday after Warren Buffett's Berkshire Hathaway revealed a new stake in the media company.

The stock rallied 15.4% Tuesday."

I will be starting my new investment fund soon thank you.

[Phoebe]

Just as I was feeling somewhat dismayed about my completely b******* decision to put $1000 in credit suisse long ago

Lol me. Trying to decide whether to double down or just ride the ride and hope that Swiss banks are Swiss Banks at the end of the day. The good news is the buying Netflix on the low has made up for this. But it would have been A lot better just to buy Netflix on the low.