Check this out. What is 1700 x $42,000 ?

lol, yep, 500 bucks or 76 million. lol.

Interesting reading and a lot of knowledge and experience. I was a landlord for awhile ( rented out my condo when I bought my house ) it was a hassle luckily my renters always paid the rent on time. If you or anybody decides to go that route make sure to run a credit report on the potential tenant. There are a lot of B.Sers out there with sob stories to try and get you to rent to them. My friend is selling a house now that he rented out for close to ten years he is so relieved to no longer be a landlord. 17 years ago I was laid off from a job with a big pharma company after 21 years I had a 401 K and a pension not knowing any better I rolled it over into an annuity and it has actually done quite well beating expectations as far as what it was expected to gain. I'm 68 and retired ( sort of ) my house is paid off and we have no real big monthly bills and my wife still works ( younger than me ) I know in a few years I will have to start withdrawing from the annuity even if I don't need the $$ and am not looking forward paying the taxes I am going to have to pay on the withdrawal.

I knew making a fact based statement would net us a fish. Lmao.

You even detailed the exact problem with timing, and don’t know enough to see it. Lol

Anyway, the simplest way to explain this to you rookies is Fidelity mentions from time to time that their best performing accounts are those that are forgotten or the owner passes away and never traded.

I’m a buy and hold type investor but do watch the market and try to trade when opportunities become apparent.
I picked up a couple stocks in March 2020. I actually bought them too early and they dropped further after I bought, but did great over the time since.
I’m still kicking myself for not recognizing a great opportunity to add to my Chevron holdings in April 2020 when oil was dropping below 0. Seems so obvious a perfect buying opportunity I can’t imagine why it didn’t occur to me then.
Warren Buffet said he has never bought at the top or sold at the bottom. He is still a bit of a trader though, a long term horizon buyer and seller.
Trading constantly like day trading is a suckers bet. Something like 95% of day traders lose money over time. Why get into it? Ego, insecurity, gambling addiction type personality?

Simple deal to do if you want to invest, when something gets to whatever % gain you wanted, sell enough to get you initial principle back and have essentially free shares. Have a friend that is a multi millionaire doing this on early tech stuff and morphed to dividend paying stocks later on. I suggested he juice the returns by selling some calls against his holdings and it makes him a nice sum every month. Not having to pay commissions is a big game changer for this as well.

Use the principle to find another investment vehicle to rinse/repeat. The bitcoin guy with 1700 is a perfect example. Sell 850 and let the rest run. It's house money!

Even if you are on the hook for a cap gains tax expense, the true cost of the investment is a percentage of the actual share cost you have recorded.

The Buffet dirty secret, he is a net seller of put options. Example - They file a sales notice with SEC for Apple selling a bunch of shares. They also are selling puts, collecting $$$$, at a significantly lower price which makes them obligated to buy shares at a price by a specificexpiration date. The option buyer can put the shares on them, if the stock price is below the sold put strike any time before expiration. Buffet sells apple, days or weeks later public disclosure gets into the market news, apple sells off and guess who is sitting there waiting for the price to fall in his lap... Gets paid to wait for the outcome they desire. Market manipulation???

Selling puts is a great way to generate income if you are comfortable owning a stock at a specific price.

Everything, even risk free return stuff, has a risk attached to it. No free lunches.

My mentors were all market timers so market timing is what I learned to do. I made money with market timing for many years, but I would've made more money if I had just bought and held a S&P 500 index fund. Of course, I would've made even more money if I had just held some of my early tech holdings! Market timing can work but it is a brutal fight. Market timing inside a taxable account is suicide, it isn't too bad if you operate inside a tax deferred account. Buy and hold works the best if you are lucky enough to buy a really good stock. Being overweighted in a great stock is the best deal possible but most of us never get the chance. Or, when we do get the chance we don't see it, or can't hold it. In the early 90's I put most of my portfolio into Intel warrants. Those Intel warrants ended up being worth $10M in the big 1999 runup but I sold well before then. I just didn't have the guts to hold on to such a large position. The volatility created so much stress that I had to sell. For the average person the best bet is an index fund. I thought I was a big time investor but I couldn't handle the stress when my account balance was whipping back and forth. The funny thing is that in hindsight I was correct and there wasn't really any risk in my position. But I didn't know it at the time and I couldn't convince myself to stop looking at the numbers all day long.

I am living proof of that. In 1978 my employer (publicly owned utility) gave all the employees some stock under an ESOP (employee stock ownership plan IIRC). The dividends were re-invested in buying more stock. When I retired in 2016 I had never touched any of that stock over the nearly 40 years that the account existed as opposed to some of my co-workers who sold their stock and bought cars, boats, snowmobiles, houses, etc. I ended up with a lot of stock that right now pays about $40k annually in dividends. It's true, sometimes even the blind squirrel finds the nut.

Looks like a good day to buy?

Buying stocks when they're only down 1-2 % in an uncertain market isn't a good buy. They're basically the same price or higher than last week.

Save for United Healthcare, they're all down sharply since last month.

Oh I know exactly what I did, I timed the market for buy in and didnt sell out in time. I still have blue chip holds from March 2020 and while the market is all red, they are still up 40% min. Fidelity just bought an 80 storey tower in decentraland, I was in there before they were.

All of my investment mistakes over the past 30 years have been on the sell side. Sometimes I sell too soon, sometimes I sell too late. My buys have all been great. Of course, I've been working in a 30 year bull market so any buy over the past 30 years has been good. It is the selling that is tricky. For the most part I sold stuff too soon. Had I just held the first stuff I bought 30 years ago until now I'd be loaded.

Your reading this from a guy that sold about 800 shares of intel stock in about 1984 for ? thought I was lucky to get most of my $$ back.
If I buy a stock, it's guaranteed to plummet and stay there until I sell, at which time it will ROCKET itno the stratosphere LOL

But on 7-11-81 I got real lucky and married a wonderful lady that Ii am still married to today. Wouldm't trade her for all the $$ that gates has

Yeah, I had a bunch of Apple stock back in the 90's that I sold because the company had hit a bad stretch. If I still had those same shares today they would be worth several million. (And I'd probably sell them today since the market it in a bumpy spot!)

Well awhile back I put in what I thought was an impossibly low order in for Netflix. It's 52 week high is over $700 and was $600 in January. Order filled at $200 today. Bargain or mistake who knows only time will tell.

I hope you do well, the Motley Fool has been hyping it all year as a buying opportunity. I'm come to regard TMF like Jim Cramer. Tipranks may not be much better?

https://www.tipranks.com/stocks/nflx/stock-analysis

I haven't bought anything tipranks doesn't call a strong buy and I'm losing my backside.

Just a guess on that tipranks analysis. Basic technical stuff using a 50% retrace of the double top high at $400 into last gap down drop, gets you to around $300, filling most of the gap. Will it fill that gap? Who knows.

If you want to reduce risk a bit and have 100 shares, sell out of the money calls against the position. Cost basis reduction approach. Good if you have a longer term outlook. About 30 days out a 220 call is selling for right at $5.10 or $510. If it stays below 220, you collect the $510. If it goes above 220 at expiration, you get 510 + 2000 in profit. It locks you out of a big run up, but that is the trade off for collecting the call premium. Hitting the strike and called away nets a 12.5% return for 24 days. Reduces your risk from 200/share to 195ish as well. If you can rinse and repeat this without hitting the strike, it further reduces the basis of your stock.


NFLX is a wild ride right now. If it breaks this 200 level, 160 is in the cards. Appears to have levels about every $20 on the downside as support to 120-140 area.

Just more stuff to chew over.

At times like these I start with just buying about 1/10 of the position I'm comfortable owning and will add a little more if it goes down each 10%. So around $180 and again $160 depending on how fast it falls. I can't time the the market and there seems to be a running for the exit sale getting ready to happen. Have cash on the sideline waiting for SP 500 to break 4,000. Might go as low as 3600 but the trick is to buy a little at a time and be willing to wait at least 3 years. But you can't use this theory when buying high risk stocks. They must be watched and protected.

Worse trade I made this past year was not buying the SARK etf when I knew about it and passed when it first opened. It shorts the ARK etf. Only up 93.4% since it opened Nov. 2021.

I went 100% cash in my portfolio at the end of 2021 since it looked like the world was going nuts. No idea when I'll buy back in. Might stay in cash all year at this rate. I'm getting eaten up by inflation but at least I'm not getting killed as the market drops. Feels a little like 2007 right now, not sure if 2008 will show back up again or not. Hopefully not, that was really rough and I'd rather not go thru it again.