Remember that when you invest in a stock, you are buying a business.  You are becoming a business owner. No smart business person would buy a business without doing some serious research first. They would want to know what the sales were, if the sales were increasing every year, how much profit those sales were [...]

When I was in my early twenties I began wondering how people made money.  No, not “made money” as in at a job.  I had a job as a computer programmer back then.  So I knew how to earn a wage. But I was trying to figure out how people accumulated real wealth. I knew [...]

If you’re tired of paltry savings account interest, and anemic stock dividends, you’ll want to pay attention to this post.  Because I’m going to tell you about a type of stock-like investment that pays some of the richest dividends out there. As a matter of fact, since 2003, they have been the best performing asset [...]

Watching the news the other night, I heard the old saw about getting a good education to get a good job.  Most of us were told that.  Our parents told us.  Our school councilors told us.  And I’ll bet if you’re a parent, you’ve told your children this too  – repeatedly. The news commentator reminded [...]

In our last post we talked about the ABC Company, a small fashion clothing store that had $500,000 in profit for the quarter (three months). And we said there were a number of things they could do with that profit.  In our last example, they divided the entire $500,000 profit among the 10,000 shares outstanding [...]

Simply put, dividends are when a company you own stock in sends you money from the profits they have made. That has a nice sound to it, doesn’t it? So let’s look into this a bit deeper. Every day, people go to work at that company.  And they are paid wages  to do this for [...]

S&P 500 Historical Dividend versus Non-Dividend Returns I mentioned in an earlier post how a dividend paying stock investment I made gained over half of its value from the dividends alone.  The remainder was from the increase in the stock price. Okay, but that was just one stock investment.  Maybe I just got lucky, right?  [...]

I was looking at one of my trading accounts the other day and noticed a dividend of $59.50 had been paid into it. Now $59.50 will not make you wealthy in and of itself.  I’m sure we can agree on that.  But something in the back of my mind told me that this stock investment [...]

Those of you who have never traded options, or are just getting into them may find this interesting.  It illustrates how knowing and applying the right technique can be profitable. And it is a true story. But first, a brief bit of background. I placed my first options trade years ago and made a quick [...]

I hear this question quite often.  My first answer is no, investing is not necessarily the same as gambling. However, the way most people invest, for all intents and purposes, is gambling.  That’s why you hear of them giving up because they lose money all the time. Let’s think about true gambling for a moment.  [...]