I talk a lot about buying individual stocks over mutual funds because I am trying to teach you the basics of Wall Street. Ironic that my next stock I would put my own money into would be T. Rowe Price (TROW) that actually is a fantastic mutual fund company that offers a variety of already pre-diversified funds. I am however looking at the actual returns from the company though and the upward spiral they have had in the last 5 years. I want you to go to www.CNBC.com, or any other place you choose to look up a stock and in the search type TROW (where you search for individual stock picks) on the site (s) it will show a stock chart you can choose 1 day, 5days, 1 year or 5 years etc. In this case pull up the chart for 5 years this chart much like an example above is quite impressive. While I will not get into the specifics at the moment of reading the graphs and strategies to interpret graphs and risk potential of a graph chart; I want you to get comfortable with searching around and understanding what it represents which is a history of previous performance. Now go pull up the graph for all time, look at the sharp dip in 2008 and notice if you were looking at a 6 month graph at that time how scary that would look. Of course you can see the big market hit in 2008 that it represents and how financial stocks took a beating but look at how T Rowe Price recovered.
Another thing that makes them very interesting to me is they pay $2.80 a share per year dividend. So if you are retired or close to retirement you can get a quarterly check during the year as a bonus and still have the overall price of your investment going up year after year.
Many of the things I consider when saying look into this stock; is that it has solid investment potential I try to look at new sectors of the economy for us where we haven't looked at before. Remember when we started with a REIT in Washington Real Estate Investment Trust (WRE) then moved into high tech with Nividia (NDVA), then to high tech / retail with Alibaba (BABA) on to Alison Transmission Holdings (ALSN) for manufacturing and RES Med (RMD) in medical and now T Rowe Price for a financial. We are building our own diversified portfolio and in a sense creating our own mutual fund. The reason for this is if one sector of the economy is performing chances are others are not, but over a 5-15 year cycle with each cycle really being around 8 years up and down you can be safe in knowing you don't have to move investments around to often and grow money over time.
Now if you are still really ski-dish about getting your feet wet buying an individual stock then look into the actual mutual funds of T Rowe Price. You might even be able to see some of them in your companies 401K plans. The reason you are seeing these in your 401K plan is because your administrator be it Fidelity, Merrill Lynch, The Principal or others have found these funds to be solid performers and a great track record over time to be wise investment choices. If you never set off on an adventure with me or the rest of my readers here and buy individual stocks it does not mean that having 5-10 mutual funds is a bad investment choice.
Donations: Paypal: williamswallstreet@gmail.com this is meant for entertainment and educational purposes only investments and purchases are your choice and I always recommend speaking with a licensed financial advisor before making any investment decisions.
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