LADoc00 said:
Does any do income-generating stuff in their downtime like day trading??
Im considering this, if anyone knows a good beginner guide to daytrading, would love to check it out. Im thinking of throwing out 25 grand and just playing around with it for a few months.
It is near impossible to make any money daytrading. Even if you have an uncanny ability to pick stocks (an extremely rare trait), any profits will be gobbled up by brokerage costs and taxes (if you hold a stock for less than a year, then you run into short term capital gains). Sure, there were daytraders who made money during the last big bull market, but everyone was making money. Most of these clowns who quit their jobs eventually lost their shirts or severely underperformed the market.
No load, low expense (and probably index) mutual funds should be the core of your investments, but if you really want to pick stocks as a hobby, then take no more than 5% of your investable money, be willing to lose it all, and then sign up for one of the online discount brokerages with low fees. I would highly recommend that you not engage in frequent daytrading, but instead do indepth research of companies and buy stocks that you plan to hold for at least a year. Truly researching a stock takes a lot of time, so that can certainly fill up your free time during the day.
As for books, there are hundreds of stock picking books. Stay away from any book that makes huge claims about your potential returns (its probably crap and you should ignore it). Otherwise, any book that teaches you the basics of stocks is probably good enough. Remember, if these authors really had fool-proof ways to get rich in the stock market, they would be doing that instead of writing books.
