I've never had good luck with stocks... my DH does well, but I know nothing about researching these things, and don't have much patience to understand it either... so I thought I'd take a shortcut...

What are you guys buying by way of stocks?

i.e. My DH bought SBUX at $25.00 still has it, and I think it's much higher now
He also bought WOOF at $15.00 and same thing happened.

I bought Cisco at $74.00 ended up selling it at $14.00 and now it's kind of rebounded I heard....

What do you suggest? Throw me some names, and maybe tell your experience and I'll check them out!

I have a few investments and some doing well, unfortunately (AND for good reazon) it's against board policy to promote specific stocks/bonds/funds AFAIK. Sorry.

Didn't know there was a board policy about this.

I'm not saying that people should spam with their latest tip sheet of the day, it was just a question as to what people are holding here that might be worthwhile.

Mods, please let me know if I was out of line.

Beer usually does well, and other necessities

look at largest CPU manufacturer in PCs - Intel

It's a "10 year investment", as they say.

Intel would be solid IMHO.

A few times in the past, someone allowed a chimp to throw a dart at a board or a similar loony procedure to pick stocks. Amazingly, often the chimp had better luck then most investors. :lol:

Research Research Research

Health Service catagory is always a hot spot.

I purchased several thousand shares of a company called Pharmacon.....on the advice of my Sister-n-law.

This was a hot tip that she swore would do great, what she failed to tell me was it was hot two weeks earlier.

Well.....several reverse splits later.....I now own something like 60 shares (I refuse to sell....hehehe) and it's valued at $32.00 for the whole lot. Who knows....maybe someday they will find a cure for the common cold...higly unlikely since they are a generic manufacturer.

I invest regularly, but it would depend on what your intent is with your investments. Long term? Short term?

I would never recommend a "hot stock" to anyone.

Due dilligence is the only way.

There are a few stocks I trade daily in and out of for example LU and SIRI (mostly news/volume driven trades).

For the long term I hold mostly big names like BAC BPA CVX DRE F GE GGP HD IBM MRK MCD PFE PG SBC WMT.

edit...oh yea...and MSFT

The only stocks I own I plan on owning for 7-10 yrs. The way I picked them was they are all large corporations, they just were all low at some point. I bought them at their lowest and in 7-10yrs I expect them to have rebounded.

*I would love to day-trade, but I just don't have the time for that kind of research, and you can't be blindly picking for that.

If you want to watch some trading in action try this www.daytraders.org chatroom http://www.daytraders.org/chat/live.htm in IRC #DAYTRADERS and also #PITSTOCK.

irc.othernet.org if you would rather use your favorite irc client

some of the companies involved in Project BioShield seem to have solid prospects for remaining profitable

<-- preparing for a morals/ethics bashing

I used to do exceptionally well by purchasing stocks of companies experiencing some sort of unexpected tragedy. Most instances weren't this extreme, but I'll give you an example of the type thing I'm talking about.

I would see on the news that a small airline company had a major crash. Knowing that the stock would plummet, I'd put in an order to purchase at $x amount, with an immediate order to sell at like $1 or $2 higher than my purchase price. In most instances, the purchase would come through at the price I wanted and I can only recall one instance where I had to wait more than a few days for the stock to rebound.

And no, I didn't make a habit of trying to benefit from the personal tragedies of others...I only did this airline crash thing once. Usually I was dealing with just "normal" news stories...but events that I knew would cause a public reaction and kill the stock prices for a couple of days.

Also, when there are some bad news like the blackout we had last year and First Energy was blamed. The stock plummeted and has now rebounded.

Invest in a good mutual fund. Let the fund manager's do the stock picking. Go "no load" funds (load funds pay a sales rep a commission, which you end up paying as the "load"). Check out Moringstar.com which rates mutual funds. I would rather invest in a stock picker than rely on myself to judge whether company A or B is better.

I have owned two no load funds which the managers are excellent: Third Avenue Value Fund and Weitz Value Fund. Wally Weitz and Marty Whitman are both value hunters: looking for investments that are worth more than what they are selling for right now. They don't buy the ebay's or cisco's, but they have bought some stock in Tejon Ranch, which owns 270,000 acre$ of land just north of Los Angeles. They also bought alot of Kmart debt and stock during the reorganization. In both cases, they analyze the breakup value and determined it was worth more than the market price at the time they invested in them... Both have done very well. Warren Buffet is a similar investor. His company is Berkshire Hathaway.

Buying anything without doing adequate research is speculation, not investing. Speculation is like playing roulette. Don't confuse investing with speculating.

Just my two cents...

I just invest in mutual funds; let somebody whose job it is worry about which stocks to pick!

I'm interested in having money for retirement, not making a fortune now (although it would be nice) so while some of my money is in high-risk funds, much more is in index funds.