I'm a 26 year old STEM guy and since my education is close to finished i will be making Money soon

I'm a 26 year old STEM guy and since my education is close to finished i will be making Money soon.

I'm looking into investing methods and im wondering the following things about stocks:

How hard is it to get enough knowledge to Profit from stock related investing

How much luck is involved

Is it worth it?

I know absolutly nothing about the topic, i dont mind investing some time.

Thanks for any advice

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>How hard is it to get enough knowledge to Profit from stock related investing
very hard you have to train 30 years in a jedi temple first
>How much luck is involved
well to be chosen you have to be lucky
>Is it worth it?
no that's why nobody ever does it

To make it more clear:

It's obviously worth it if youre a trained professional, my question is, if it's feasible in a readonable amount of time for someone who has to start from scratch.

>How hard is it to get enough knowledge to Profit from stock related investing
Knowledge? ~6months
Skill? 3-6 years

>How much luck is involved
Varies, but will always be non-zero

>Is it worth it?
The returns are % based. Do the math STEM guy.

Yeah well how high do these % go? if i start with 10k and get like 3% of that Profit a year i obviously wont bother learning for month just to make 300 a year more.

The range goes from -100% to... i have no idea. There is of course an upper band, but leverage and big movements in penny stocks & crypto make things pretty difficult to put a top on.

I wasnt asking for a concrere value, more like a Risk:Profit relation.

Obviously i wont be making 1000% Profit without some all in risk shit, but if i cant go above like 5% with low risk then i dont really need to bother

Small amounts of money could see, with max leverage and massive luck, thousands of %.

Large amounts of money would see much smaller gains because they are unable to get into position as easily and generally use less leverage because you are (hopefully) being safer.

Thanks, but can you give a more practical number?

Let's say 10k Investment and average lucky/unlucky, what kind of profits can i realisticly expect after i get some knowledge and experience?

When you're talking about %'s, how much of your account balance you use doesn't alter your % return.

This is part of the skill, your risk:reward all depends on you. The risk will vary by what type of product you are trading, how you set your stops, how you offset with options, etc.

I mean, shit dude. You've seen the movies.

If you're good, pick which lambo you want to drive to the strip club you own today and how much blow you want to do out of an ass crack.

If you're average? well you probably lost everything.

Protip: the guy in the 1st example probably lost everything about 2-3x before he got to that level of skill

better stocks can yield from 7-15% per year usually. part of it is dividend part is inflation part is the stock becoming more valued.

they are high risk investments on the scale of investments because short medium term you can actually lose money on them (not very likely long term unless you buy the top of a bubble and select shit stocks)

So what i get from this is that getting into stocks is hard, risky and i can expect heavy losses before i see any gains.

This seems very unsuited for me as i cant just blow all my money ouf of the Window a couple times a year.

Should i look into more conservative Investments? Buying a house in a huge City and rent it out or whatever?

no, first and foremost you should research a bit about the markets. for example in your area inflation adjusted how expensive houses are? how is the rent to buy cost ratio? generally speaking unless rents are very high it's not a very good business to buy to rent out.most people rent out real estate not to lose money in the meantime they are not living in it or not selling it yet.

stock markets are the same, you have to look at the PE ratio of stocks available to you and inflation adjusted prices of index funds. and buy stocks when they are undervalued (altho if a stock has good PE it can also mean the company is shit and investors feel from it so better buy when the entire market has good PE)

What concerns me about the stock market is that it seems to be continuously time consuming. Like i have to spend 2h every night checking my stocks and what not and i cant do that.

I need an investment method that doesnt need a huge amount of maintenance after the initial Phase of studying Up how it Works

>Like i have to spend 2h every night checking my stocks and what not and i cant do that.
that's absolutely not true tho. only if you do penny stocks and high-frequency trading.

you can just buy index funds and let the market sort it out long term. you will have decent returns over inflation usually in a long enough period of time.

i would say stocks are low maintenance but you have to put time into selecting them or it will bite you in the ass. with index funds you already have a well diversified portfolio that is mostly dependent on the overall market performance. it's for people that don't know anything about stocks and don't want to micro manage them. the fund managers are experts and they do the heavy lifting. funds have fees tho you have to pay the managers. and when the market is not well you will lose money.

the problem is currently PE ratios are horrible the stock market is in a bubble according to many experts. so maybe you should wait and learn more before you invest.

I'd say it's worth it. 7% of the money I've managed to save, for free, every year? For a couple books I read before bed and in the library, plus a few hours a year? Some of the best investments I've made were investing. That said, I have been lucky - I entered the market in 2012, and I think the market's due for a correction which will knock that return figure down temporarily.

As for what I've learned, there's three things that if you understand them, you'll know as much as me. I won't keep you in suspense:

1. The man walking the dog metaphor: Imagine you see a man walking a dog on one of those super-long retractable leashes. If you're watching the dog and ignoring the man, you won't know where he'll end up. At any point he'll be going the same direction as the man, the opposite direction, or hanging out to sniff or pee on something. If you watch the man and ignore the dog, you'll figure out pretty quickly where both are going to end up. The dog is the stock price, while the man is the financial information. Don't look at stock prices, look at cash flow and balance sheets.

2. Buying low and selling high is a matter of discipline, not intelligence. Set a target stock-bond or stock-cash ratio and dates on which you'll either buy or sell stocks until you're at your target again (this is called rebalancing). Suppose you buy 50% stocks and the market tanks, you lose a quarter of your net worth because your stocks are only worth half of what they were. Come your rebalance day, instead of 50-50, you're at 33-66. The thing to do is when that comes around, convert a quarter of your cash position to stocks. Don't hang around to buy more when they get lower, don't get out of the market because it will never recover, leave that to the pros. Just get back to whatever you decided your ratio should be.

3. Practice. I got an investopedia account and traded a hypothetical portfolio before risking real money. It was the right call.

That sounds like if i buy index funds and wait 10 years i get guaranteed profit and the only thing i have to do is tell and pay a guy to do it?

There has to be a downside to this

Thank you, practicing sounds like a very good idea. Do you happen to have some pointers how/where to go for that?

You said investopedia, do i just go there, play that stock simulating game and thats it?

well maybe you need your money in 5 years and the economy is in a deflation and stocks aren't worth shit. that's a huge downside.

basically the exact time when you can access your money with real profit is hard to foresee, maybe 10 years maybe 15 maybe even 20. it could also be your stocks are profitable all the way and you don't have this problem (highly unlikely tho)

you see dividends are payed based on how well the company does. and the stock price is basically the markets view on how much the company is worth. if you go for good dividends then the markets opinion means fuck all in general bear market. when you have a PE ratio around 10 that means your return on investment is 10 years. that's very decent. but even stocks that have shit PE can be good investments if the market valuation grows (bull market) they will be shit in a bear market tho when people withdraw money form the stock market.

I dont need fast Access to the money, its more like i can take 1k off my earnings each month without it really hurting me, so why shouldnt i

So my best move is to Google Up some investment guys who do this professionally and let them do the work?

index funds and etfs are probably your best bet, they generally don't require a middle man other than your bank. trusting a broker with your money should be carefully considered. even big broker houses have swindled their customers big time. go big go for things that are widely known to be trustworthy and work try to cut out any small middleman.

if you save 1k every month put that in index funds with 10-11% average yield you could have a million in 20 years or so is the theory.

>"To achieve satisfactory results is easier than most people realize; to achieve superior results is harder than it looks."

You could split your captial 50/50 select DJIA issues and treasury bonds and you'd earn about 6% a year (using current rate on t bonds). This should earn 6% compounded cycle to cycle, e.g. if you average out the recessions and the good years. You might want to wait until the next recession is over.

Anything above this needs knowledge, experience and hard work. If you try for higher returns by listening to shit like buy ETH you're going to lose money.

If you want to try, read Intelligent Investor, Security Analysis and Benjamin Graham's lectures. Investopedia is good for the accounting terms.

Your returns are generally proportional to how much work you put in. At the extreme end of low maintenance you could buy a suitable index fund like the S&P 500 and never look at it again.

oldschoolvalue.com/stock-screener.php

This site automatically calculates stocks based on several famous metrics. There's Alan Greenspan's magic formula, Benjamin Graham's net net stocks and so on. You could try this with half your money in safe bonds.

That's all I did, for about a year before I started using real money. Very glad I did too, I tried a couple different approaches in that game and some worked better than others.

I also recommend 'the intelligent investor' by Ben Graham if you want more detail on item 2 in my list.

What kind of return am i looking at with the S&p500 never look at it again thing?

JUST FUCKING HOLD

personal.vanguard.com/us/funds/performance?FundId=0040&FundIntExt=INT&DisplayBarChart=false
10% before taxes, but there is also a fee i think, so realistically 5-7%

and here is some interesting aspects that come to play with investment, can you take advantage of some form of delayed taxing? (like murrican roth and 401k) because if you can and you reinvest the money you gain, your growth will be a lot better than if you immediately pay taxes each year.