Intro to investments for the newly graduated

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The most addicting part of investments and the stock market is that there is so much to learn and so many ways to make mistakes. My first go at investments began in the second year of medical school when I was on the sidelines hearing conversations among my friends about their investment portfolios. Then I started to have all these crazy ideas about how if i invested 5K into Taser (which was hot at the time) –> I would have over 100 thousand dollars or some ridiculous number. Then there were stock splits and dividends too for Taser and other hot companies in 2003-2004.

Needless to say, my first picks were ZEUS (because I loved greek mythology and the steel company had a cool ticker symbol –> I doubled my money! hail the king of the gods eh?) I then bought Microsoft which was going no where so I sold at a loss of a dollar a share or about 20 dollars because I only bought 20 shares. I also bought Alcon because they are a leader in the ophthalmologic field and makes pretty good products that we see and use everyday like those no rub contact solutions that are ubiquitous today. I made about 60% increase in my profits from that in about 1.5 years. Finally I also bought ISRG which I bought close to IPO at 18 dollars and is currently running at 138 dollars. There was a stock split right before I purchased it but overall, I’m very happy with the firm Intuitive Surgical. This company is the company that you hear about in the hospitals –the daVinci surgical robots. Overall my experience in the market has been a positive one.

The big reason why this is the case is because after the crash post 9/11 and also the crash from the tech bubble, the market has gain a lot of ground. There was some corrections along the way but if you bought after the crash, then you did well for yourself. The bull markets been going for a few years now.

What I’d like to do in my series of articles about investing (click on the categories on the left under investments) is to take you, my fellow colleagues, into the world of investments. I know you are probably thinking…well…I’m going to be just a resident making a measly 40K a year so what I want to do is to make investments relevant to you.

The disclaimer here is that I am not a financial adviser so please take this for what its worth. I enjoy reading up on and learning about the economy and the market and will try to digest and share that information with you. Some of the basic things that I want to cover is

1. what is the stock market, what’s investing, what are the various ways that we can invest?
2. employer retirement accounts
3. IRAs vs. 401k vs. 403b vs. 457b vs. 529s. What does this all mean?
4. who are the brokerages that everyone signs up with and why do you need them to invest?
5. what the heck is fundamental analysis and what the heck is technical analysis?
6. how does investing complicate your taxes? and how can you take advantage of tax benefits of investing
7. understanding the stock chart, what is P/E vs. PEG vs. EPS vs. etc etc. and how I calculate them for myself. –> this goes into valuations and how I go about valuating a company or figuring out the net worth of the company and its correlation with the stock price.
8. mutual funds vs. ETFs vs. the common share.
9. What is the DOW, NASDAQ, SP500 and the various ways to use indexes.
10. introduction to investing in precious metals.
11. what is a hedge fund and how can I get involved?
12. bonds, what are they and should i invest in them?
13. and so on and so forth…

As you can see there are a lot of things that a person needs to learn about in order to fully understand investing in general. The easiest thing that you can do is to give your money to someone else to invest for you but you still need to know what is going on because the bottom line is that only you care the most about the bottom line and no one else.

I look forward to any future comments as I write these articles.

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