It didn’t take most of us long to realize the stock trading education we got in school wasn’t going to come in handy. Looking back at the lessons we wish we were taught back in school, these two stood out like poop droppings from noisy birds roosting in a tree near your bedroom.

#2 – Contrary Opinion Is One of the Most Important Tools to Success On Wall Street

Think outside the box. In other words, you will want to go contrary to the crowd most of the time. This won’t make you feel too good, and it won’t rest well with some of your friends, family, or associates. By contrary opinion, I mean simply that you must assess the prevailing majority opinion, and you must be willing to think and DO the opposite. When most people are afraid to buy stocks, then you must seriously consider buying stocks.

When most people are convinced that things are good, and that the good times will never end, you must take actions that will serve you well when the good times do end. When most people are panicking, you must be calm and collected, taking logical steps instead of reacting irrationally. When most people are pessimistic, you want to be an optimist.

Take the recent terrorist attack of a passenger jet on Christmas day. While everybody else was busy getting mad and pointing fingers, you should have quietly been buying airport and sea port security stocks.

It wasn’t just one stock either, it was the entire airline security sector. Check out this stock.

These money making opportunities appear all the time. Let’s go back a few months to the swine flu. You were too busy sitting in front of the news and feeling scared like everyone else. While everybody else was glued to their TVs watching these scary news stories, you should have snuck out the back door and over to your trading station and started buying swine flu vaccine stocks.

You can even use the more extreme example of the much feared Y2K bug: which was supposed to bring with it financial chaos, the collapse of the power grid, anarchy, mass confusion, and worse. Some of the most well-known analysts, politicians, and scientists staked their reputations on the belief that cataclysmic events—socially, politically, economically, and technologically— would happen when the new millennium started. And nothing happened. Not one thing.

We were warned by TV News programs and newspapers that banks might close down, that we might not have electricity, that we might not be able to have medical prescriptions filled, and that food distribution would stop or be curtailed. We were told to buy canned food and expensive emergency Y2K packs. The Y2K bug was one of the most obvious examples of how panic can be infectious.

I’ll make it very simple and straightforward for you: What most people think is wrong and when most people are thinking one way, odds are that events will develop the opposite way. Yes, it will be very difficult for you to be a contrary thinker, but it can yield great rewards.

This takes us to the most important lesson you wish you would have been taught in school.

#1 – You Have to Think for Yourself On Wall Street

This seems very obvious, doesn’t it? By the way, we all think that we think for ourselves. In truth, we are brainwashed daily by the media, by newspapers, and by friends, family, and those we love. Does this mean that you should not read newspapers, watch television, or listen to the radio? Should you also diss those you love? The answer is simple: Develop your ideas independently, evaluating all other ideas and statements within the framework of what you believe yourself.

It’s easy to be a passive tosser (when you are influenced from external forces to make a particular decision and then flaunting that decision as if you thought of it only to end up with egg on your face at a later time).

The sophistamacated (people that think they are intelligent, but really have absolutely no idea what they are talking about), intelligent-looking, smooth-talking anchor person on business television or the nightly news may appear to know what he or she is talking about. The odds are that they know nothing more than what they’re reading. Their script has been prepared for them; they’re merely reading the words that OTHER people have written for them from a teleprompter.

Who are these OTHER people? Do they have hidden agendas like Glenn Beck of Fox News who recommended you buy gold and never disclosed that he was a paid spokesman for the company Goldline? Do they know what they’re talking about? Are they merely reflecting the opinions of others? You’ll find that most of the time their thinking is very standard, very average, and very wrong.

Lance Jepsen
President, GuerillaStockTrading.com
Your Trading Coach
(because everyone, even Lyoto Machida, needs a coach)

Technorati Tags: afraid to buy stocks, buying airport and sea port security stocks, buying stocks, buying swine flu vaccine stocks, contrary opinion, contrary to the crowd, stock trading education, success on wall street

Mike ‘Bro’ was an average guy working at a day job (Just Over Broke) and trying to make money by trading at the same time.

He had Googled how to pick stocks, like he had done a dozen times before. Only this time, he stumbled upon a stock screener website I am about to show you.

Mike used the stock screener and then brought a list of five stocks to my desk and asked me to do technical analysis on each of them.

I was sort of pissed off because I had been trying to teach Mike technical analysis so that he wouldn’t need me to do it for him.

My anger soon melted away and was replaced by shock when I pulled up the charts and saw how good they looked.

I gave him the best looking stock from a technical analysis only point of view.

Over the next 7 months, Mike rode that stock up for a 500% profit. This stock was NOT a penny stock either.

I was like damn! I should have bought that!

Mike kept bringing me these fantastic looking stocks but he would not be truthful with me about how he actually found them.

Finally, I laid down the law. “Dude. I’m sitting her doing technical analysis on these stocks for you and you won’t even be honest with me. I’m not helping you anymore until you come clean with how you are finding these.”

Mike finally came clean with the free stock screener he uses to find these explosive, “righteous rocket” stocks.

Now I’m going to give you the website that has this killer FREE stock screener on it and teach you how to use it.

The killer stock screening tool is at:
http://moneycentral.msn.com/investor/finder/deluxestockscreen.aspx?query=Righteous+Rockets&btnQryFrm=Go

Most stock screening tools you find will have their own unique financial industry language.

Notice the wording “Righteous Rockets”. Righteous Rockets are businesses that seem undervalued, are profitable, and have relatively low debt, thus making them “righteous.” Furthermore, they’re quickly growing and have begun to see considerable stock price appreciation – making them “rockets.” The ticker symbol and name of the corporation is on the left. The criteria used for this particular stock screener are Market Capitalization, Return on Equity, Price Sales/Ratio, Debt to Equity Ratio, and Revenue Growth This Year Compared to Last Year.

Market capitalization is the total value of the firm. It’s calculated by multiplying the number of outstanding shares times the current stock price of those shares. Market capitalization is sometimes called market value.

Return on equity (ROE) is usually equity earnings as a proportion of net worth. You divide the most recent year’s net income by shareholders’ equity (shareholders’ equity is assets minus liabilities) to calculate ROE.

Price-to-sales ratio, P/S ratio, or PSR, is a evaluation metric for stocks. It is figured out by dividing the company’s market cap by the company’s revenue in the most recent fiscal year (or the most current four fiscal quarters); or, equally, divide the per-share stock price by the per-share revenue.

The metric can be used to determine the value of a stock relative to its past performance. It may also be used to determine relative valuation of a sector or the market as a whole.

To resolve the debt to equity ratio, divide the company’s total amount of long-term debt by the total amount of equity. (Equity is defined as the residual claim by stockholders of company assets, after creditors and preferred stockholders have been paid.) This ratio measures the proportion of debt the company is carrying. A lot of companies average a debt level of 50 percent. Debt to equity ratios greater than 50 percent may hint at trouble. That is, if sales drop, the firm may not be able to pay the interest payments due on its debt.

Revenue Growth Year Over Year (yoy) is self clarifying. For example, in the first quarter of 2006, Ebay posted Revenue Growth (yoy) of 34.80%. That means that through the most recent quarter accessible for this year (first quarter 2006) Ebay’s Revenue grew 34.80% compared to the parallel quarter of last year (first quarter 2005).

Technorati Tags: free stock screener, how to pick stocks, investor, stock screening tool, stock screening tools

The billionaire John Paulson is chasing gold. After gold has already ran up 70% over the last 12 months, he’s starting a mining company fund where he will invest $250 million of his own money. What a n00b (n00bs are arrogant traders who know little and have no will to learn any more. They are usually rich and they expect other people to do the work for them and then expect to get praised about it).

This n00b is buying gold at $1,200 to $1,250 an ounce, after it has already spiked up.

I’m no Einstein economist but didn’t anybody see what happened on Friday in the stock market?

Here comes the rich dummy talk…

When the economy starts to improve as hiring increases and unemployment claims decrease, the dollar will strengthen and gold will go in the toilet as money exits gold and goes back into stocks.

What about gold acting as an inflationary hedge as we come out of this economic bear market?

The dollar gaining in value will not make gold rise as it did a few years back. At least not at first. The reason, the dollar has taken such a beating and is down so low that inflation will not be a threat for many years. The dollar could easily go up 10, 15, even 20 points and more before inflation becomes a threat and money moves into gold as an inflationary hedge like we saw years ago. Gold acting as an inflationary hedge comes into play at the end of an economic bull market (when the FED has artificially raised interest rates to high levels in order to slow down economic growth), not at the beginning!

The n00b Paulson is not only chasing gold, but he thinks gold will go to $2,000 to $5,000 an ounce.

What does this all mean? It means the buy gold mania, or buy gold frenzy is close to coming to an end.

John Paulson is another one of those one hit wonders that eventually crash and burn.

As Saijel Kishan of Business Week writes, “The founder of Paulson and Co. doesn’t even look average this year. His biggest portfolio, Advantage Fund, has returned 15% vs. 17% for peers.”

History is littered with these n00bs.

So here’s the word those with gold clap are spreading on the street: John Paulson made millions shorting the housing market and so you should listen to him about chasing gold at these levels.

So what.

Hundreds of thousands of small traders made money shorting the housing market. For every buyer there had to be a seller and there was more sellers than buyers. That’s WHY it went down.

It’ll be good to see another guy who thinks he poops gold bricks buy the ticket and take the ride in the stock market.

History is filled with people smoking the one hit wonder weed like Paulson who, after a great call on shorting the housing market, have turned into just another mediocre investor looking for the next crapportunity.

Take Benjamin Graham, arguably the greatest investor of all time, Graham was wiped out personally in the stock market crash of 1929.

What about the stock trader murderer Warren Buffett who has averaged less than a 15% return a year for the last 20 years and would have lost everything in October of 2008 when be bought banks too early and told everyone else to do the same. Had you followed Buffett, and many traders did, the coroner would be picking up your stiff body from the corner of Wall Street and HeroWorship.

Then Buffet Molestor left rich man’s land and ran to the government and lobbied hard, and with some behind closed door deals, got the tax payor to bend over and give billions of tax dollars to invest in his companies. A good chunk of his fortune is dependent on taxpayers. Were it not for government bailouts, for which Buffet Molestor lobbied hard, many of his company’s stock holdings would have been wiped out.

What about the icon cow Jack Bogle who created Vanguard? After having a good early strategy of buy and hold, his company Vanguard has some of the worst performing funds over the last 10 years. The average fund at Vanguard has only achieved a 6% gain per year over the last 10 years.

I could go on with those down on the rap sheet for smoking the one hit wonder weed.

The truth is that people want heroes, they want to engage in hero worship, it’s part of being human.

The reality is that no one should be chasing gold above $1,200.

And before you engage in hero worship, just remember the old Wall Street adage, “You are only as good as your last trade.”

Technorati Tags: bear market, billionaire, buy gold, economic growth, inflation, john paulson, mining company, n00b, n00bs, one hit wonders, stock market, unemployment claims

Having the goal of getting rich in the stock market is really lame. In fact, it’s suicide on Wall Street.

I realized early on that among the most common characteristics in most prosperous traders I’d came across was that they set goals.

The most common characteristic of traders that have washed out of the market is that they never set goals and the only goal they had was to get rich trading stocks.

People are at their best when they set goals. People perform at their best when they have a goal clearly in their mind. That is the way the human mind works. When we have a goal clearly in our minds, our subconscious works very hard at helping us to accomplish that goal. It does it quite automatically without being forced to reason using willpower.

A goal must have three important characteristics:
1) Your goal must be realistic.
2) Your goal must be attainable.
3) Your goal must be measurable.

Your goal must be realistic. This means that your goal has to be something that is within your capabilities. Sure, it may be possible to make a million dollars your first year trading, but it’s, in all likelihood, not very realistic because it isn’t within your capabilities yet.

Your goal must be attainable. This is akin to a goal being realistic. Again, your goal must be within your capabilities. So, an example might be if you are seeking to average $100-$200 a day with your trading. You hold a much better chance of being able to reach that goal versus the goal to make a million dollars this year. Don’t get me wrong, if you are doing very well with your current goal, there’s no reason you can’t raise it within reason. But you must start with a goal that is attainable and then you can build on it. I highly suggest starting with a small goal and moving up from there.

Your goal must be measurable. This is one I see people making a mistake about day in and day out. Everybody wants to get rich or make a fortune in the market. That seems to be everybody’s goal. But you know what, that isn’t really a goal. A goal must be measurable. You must be able to know when you’re far away, close, and when you’ve achieved your particular goal. If it’s not measurable, you won’t know when you’re there, and even worse, you won’t know how close you are to reaching your goal.

Take a moment to create a short term trading goal. Leave any comments you might have below. Thank you and happy improved trading.

Lance Jepsen
President, GuerillaStockTrading.com
Your Trading Coach
(because everyone, even Lyoto Machida, needs a coach)

Technorati Tags: better chance, fortune, million dollars, mistake, stock market, subconscious, suicide, trading stocks, wall street

Attention all investors… buy and hold about to become dangerously obsolete because…

Learn the Guerilla Stock Trading strategy that is responsible for making 26% in the last 9 months in a low risk S&P 500 etf… See Proof In the Video Below!

Hypie? Yes. Does it work? YES! … And I can guarantee you’ve never seen OR heard about half of the stuff this software can do for YOU.

This tool was made to make you money and grow your stock trading business to levels you never thought were possible.

In the video below, I am going to look at the S&P 500 and show you why buy and hold does not work anymore. If you are still a buy and hold investor, then you need to change your trading strategy.

A buy and hold strategy on the S&P 500 would put you down 28% between December 2008 and September 18th 2009.

The Guerilla Stock Trading method of hit and run would put you up 26% over the same time span!

That’s an eye-popping difference of 54% !!!

The video below will blow your mind.

Technorati Tags: buy and hold, investor, investors, money, risk, stock trading strategy

1. Advertising: There is no better place than to invest in advertising. Investing in advertising is one of the best investment strategies. With the world blooming with technology now, there is a lot of scope for advertising and this demand is on the threshold of tremendous increase from day to day. Every product needs some form of marketing to reach the people and there is not better tool to approach the public than by ‘advertising’. Investing in some advertising company can bring you lots and lots of higher returns.

2. Long term investment strategies: Investing in long term investing strategies can bring you higher returns. The more you place you investments at a particular place for longer term, the more are the returns. Also investing through long term investing strategy can avoid certain losses and risks. Short term investing strategies of course promise higher returns but are completely volatile if the market situations get worse. Whereas long term investments promise some higher returns besides offering security to the investment you made-the only difference being the time period.

3. Investing Conservatively So That One Does Not Risk All His Capital: If one doesn’t wish to retire wealthy, (everyone does), the investment strategy is to put in a major portion of his investment assortment conventionally to guard the principal because these funds would be needed for one’s retirement and does not wish to risk on forceful investing that could propose the possibility of huge returns but in addition has a possibility of absolute and complete losses. It is acceptable to risk a diminutive part of investment interest if one must, but by no means risk the chief capital. That is, one can risk a minor amount of capital but should not risk his major capital at any cost which might turn to disaster.

4. Cost Averaging: One of the techniques. This would be taking the judgments on getting in or coming out of the particular industries or stocks on energetic basis and in isolation over the long term that the investor would be set to profit. Normally investing and cost averaging in the mutual funds now on a unremitting base can be made through some ways like Systemized Investment Plan or Methodical relocate Plan. This is usually a structure where one investor consigns to put in a provided proposal of mutual fund for some period ranging from around six months to ten years which is very long. This could be prepared either by cheques which are post dated or by Direct Debiting services from accounts of the investors where those accounts are debited automatically for the before said amount period to period. So the advantages of this kind of investment strategy are many. The main significant benefit is that these investments are spread over diverse market levels and conditions of market index so that the investors do not feel any danger of market timing. Second important thing, in the long run a superior corpus of investment will get built. This is essentially an investment model, conversely here investor firstly invests a little amount in the debt oriented method of mutual fund in which a distinct sum gets transferred to a selected equity fund monthly.

5. Recognize the pattern: Just investing in something expecting high return is nothing but a foolish task, particularly in stocks. In an investment field such as a stock market, it is very beneficial to recognize the pattern of the stocks so as to make necessary changes in one’s own investment strategy. Stock market is terribly volatile and what is now present cannot continue in the next second. Recognizing the pattern beforehand can help you establish your stocks in the market.

These are only few of the top investing strategies. There are plenty of others out there and one can employ a strategy that he finds feasible in his sight. But before deciding on a strategy, it is highly recommended to do a little research to know the pros and cons of investing in that particular area.

Discover more about investing strategies by visiting an archive of articles on this subject and other sources closely related to investing strategies.

Technorati Tags: finance, information on investing, investing, investing financially, Investing in stocks, investing money, investment strategies, investments, stock investing, Stocks and shares