Today's Stock Market Crash: Mr Reasonable

Same as everyone else’s. Don’t do it. Too risky. You don’t start trading currencies until you’ve invested in just about everything else and still have money left to play with.

That’s what I do. Open a practice account with FXCM (not available in the US anymore, but you can still use the GBP practice account) They have the best software (Trading Station). Mess around with it for a couple years before you think about throwing real money in. I’ve blown up more accounts than I can remember.

TradingView also has a practice account, but it’s not realistic since you can’t go broke. I made $13 million last year trading gold on TradingView. Just keep buying all the way down because you can’t run out of money :wink:

With stocks, you need $25k if you want to daytrade (buy and sell in one day, 4 times in one week, or something like that). If you buy and sell the same day, that counts against one of your 4 for the week. If you violate it, you’re labeled a “pattern daytrader” and must keep your account above $25k or never buy and sell in the same day again (or switch brokers). The SEC sucks, which is why I trade currencies now. You’re more hogtied in the land of the free than in any other country where trading exists.

Realistically, if you want to trade stocks, you need $100k to start. I mean, unless you’re really good or really lucky or really patient and do not trade much.

I don’t know much about options, but maybe there is a way to circumvent some of the crap with them. On the other hand, more leverage is greater risk so I don’t know. If you get lucky, you can get into a straddle where there is no risk and all reward, but that requires patience and luck. Warren Buffett said the market is a mechanism for the transfer of money from the impatient to the patient.

I’m thinking about buying and holding physical foreign currencies thereby exchanging them as their value goes up against the United States dollar. I predict this happening with the Chinese renminbi.

You can do that with forex.com. Not physical, but you can sell the USD/CNH. 1 microlot is 1000 of them. You’ll also be paid 9 cents interest per day, 7 days, 365 ($32.85 per year unless rates change). It will cost $100 to hold the position, meaning your account value cannot fall below that.

Interesting, I’ll have to look into that.

I’ve heard that with some international corporate large banks you can just walk right in and exchange money for foreign currency directly but I think you have to have an account with them to do so. You know, skip the middle man and such. I wonder how feasible or profitable doing that is in the long run. I see Chinese renminbi skyrocketing in value as it now gold backed and is basically preparing to cut against all international dollar markets. It will essentially become the new international currency of choice for trading unfortunately in that I am no fan of the communist Chinese nonetheless I am realist and that is where I see things going.

They’ll charge fees to make it economically prohibitive to exchange hard currencies at bank branches for profit.

Why not invest in an ETF that tracks Asian bonds? Or one that tracks gold? Or volatility in the US markets? Why not buy short options for QQQ?

Do what the people who are making money are doing instead of trying to come up with a hairbrained way to do it differently. There are plenty of people on Wall Street who believe the same things that you believe. They’re shorting the indexes, they’re buying funds that are diversified across foreign bond markets, and they’re trading the VIX.

It seems like a headache to me. It reminds me of owning gold… as soon as I buy any, I’m $50 in the hole and require a $50 appreciation just to get back to even because of the spread. The spread is less with paper gold. It could be the same with real money.

You can also trade currencies with ameritrade, but the spreads are higher since they go through forex.com or oanda. But ameritrade is a full-service bank/broker and you can trade anything (lots of ways to lose your money lol). They have bill pay, stocks, futures, forex, debit cards, whatever.

This is a good one to buy and hold.

reuters.com/finance/stocks/ … file/FAX.A

Not a lot of volatility in the share price, so easy in and out therefore good liquidity. Good diversification, and counting on economies getting better on the other side of the world, but in the event that they don’t, you’ll have taken out decent amount of your capital over time by cashing the dividend check. But, you’d probably be smarter to just take fractional shares instead of the dividend, because you know…those economies are probably going to get better.

I use ameritrade. It’s the shit.

I only make bets or invest money in sure things that are sound in that I don’t like taking financial risks. I’m nowhere in a position now to take risks of any kind anyways. Yeah, I think you’re right that they charge fees at foreign currency trading desks in banks. Like Serendipper said, Forex might be my best choice.

A lot of those index funds depreciate. I can’t find a good one to track oil since if I match the spot price with the etf, I find it decays too much.

Any leveraged fund decays, so I wouldn’t bother. The house has it rigged so they always win.

That said, there is probably a fund that tracks the yuan. I’d guess it’s thinly traded, small, and probably doesn’t match spot very well, but maybe not.

Yup, it’s the best!

I’ve only studied this stuff theoretically or through observing speculation in that I’ve never actually invested and traded in anything. Any advice would help.

I nowhere near have enough money for stocks, bonds, and all those other things. For me all of that is like a giant international casino where you better have a lot of money when taking losses.

I think currency trading is my best bet at the moment for me to get my feet wet with the little bit of money that I have. Minimal risk, exposure, and loss is my thing.

If that’s all you’re wanting to do, forex.com is the cheapest way to do it. Ameritrade is a good bank though which also allows you to trade whatever, though at slightly higher cost since they’re a middleman to another middleman. There are really only 2 forex brokers in the US anymore and I don’t care for oanda. FXCM was the best, but they were kicked out not long ago. It used to be that you could open an account with $50 and have 400:1 leverage across the board, but things happened. Barney Frank and the CFTC.

There are some overseas accounts too, which I won’t go into unless you’re interested (which I doubt you would be considering the difficulty in funding them).

The best advice is DEMO ACCOUNT! Don’t play with money you cannot afford to lose. If you make money, stop for a while. Don’t keep going in trying to make opportunities. You’ll probably make money at first and that will sucker you back in because you’ll think you’re a genius and you won’t stop until it’s all gone and then some. Been there; done that :laughing:

As far as eventually failing to track the underlying commodity, sure…in some cases. But if you bought QQQ a few years ago, or at just about any time since then, then you’d be in the money on it right now. UWTI tracked oil very well, but got shut down because it was dangerously volatile, if I’m remembering correctly it was one of those that moves the same as the underlying commodity buy with increased volatility or beta. So great for getting in and out…it seemed, but people were losing their asses left and right trying to time the market.

Tell Zero the truth…for a variery of complex reasons, forex trading is a bad idea, especially for the risk-averse. I just want him to go to computershare and start DRIPs for XOM, LMT, UNP and SO. Then in a few years he’ll have the money to actually make a rent check without having to look for a massive short term price move in whatever he wants to buy.

Zero, a 100 percent gain is hard to find in between rent payments. So even if you had an extra month’s rent to throw into something and you found a 100 percent gain, you’d just have a month’s rent. If you put 100 a month, 25 a week into something that appreciates and pays good dividends and is safe…then over time you’d have 10 months rent saved up, and you would only need to find a 10 percent move in whatever you’re buying on a monthly basis to cash out and have some free rent.

Am I making sense here? The first step in being a capitalist exploiter of things who profits off nothing and lives for free and is a lazy piece of shit who gets away with financial murder…is to have some capital. Save money dude. Stop letting politics and emotions prevent you from doing that. Just get 100 a month into the bank and play the game. You’re young. You can’t even conceptualize the difference that it can make in your life to do whatever you have to do to get that capital.

So, understanding the basics of currency trading starting out with say $100.00 is it very difficult understanding daily market fluctuations or rotations doubling your money overtime?

What’s a DEMO account?

Computershare has no-fee DRIPs for a decent number of safe dividend stocks and allow for purchases of fractional shares. All you need is a basic checking account, a routing number, an account number and however much cash you can afford to put in.