The money I have other people working for me in the market is doing well....I've tried to do some homework and have had reasons why I purchased every stock I selected.

Every single one has been a dismal loser.

Etrade itself is easy to operate and I don't have any issues with that....I'm just really shitty at picking individual stocks. The good news is every dime I've put into it was "extra" money I've gotten in side hustles, wagers won etc.

I guess I need to spend more time learning.

I'm the only one at my deer camp and inner circle who didn't buy into bitcoin and shitcoins and this was my test to show them how stupid they were......it's been pretty comparable outcomes so far, but I'm waiting on that upswing on my selections that hasn't come yet.
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There is a lot to be said for a manager who is excellent. Mine does an amazing job and for that I am thankful.
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That's my problem as well, but part of the issue is that I just DGAF - not passionate about it. I'm passionate about making money, but that's why I've invested my money into what I do with my businesses. Now that I have whittled my business dealings into one entity, and my day-to-day with it is much less than it used to be, I have the time to focus a little more into analyzing what I might want to invest in. I'll probably open an account sometime this month and give it a go with my slush fund.
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I stand corrected-got my Scientifics mixed up! :-)
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Some good things to think about here


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OKay, I have a really stupid question. I know some of you like stocks that pay dividends. (Rainman). How long do you have to own the stock to receive the dividend? I know it pays out qtrly.

So ,really my question is .... if a stock has a declared date of say 7/1 and a payable date of 7/20 does that mean you can acquire the stock on 6/25 and get the dividend and then dump it after 7/20 and move to the next stock.

Greedy bastards want to know.
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I've never quite figured out how that works. It seems logical that you could take $XX and invest it in twelve different stocks that each pay out a dividend on a different month, and pretty much have a guaranteed high return. But that's so obvious that I have to think that the market corrects for it.

It seems that the common theory is that a stock price naturally fluctuates to take into account the fact that a dividend is about to be paid, and it does so in a way that corrects for the differences. That seems kind of suspicious to me, because it still seems like you could take advantage of that since it's a known future change in the stock price. But I've never studied it to see if there's a predictable change. Maybe I should, but it seems that if there was something that simple and predictable, Wall Street would be all over it.

Short answer: I don't know, and it's a good question. It seems like there should be a way to game the system, but I suspect there's some rule that keeps us from doing it.
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I'm hoping wall street people don't have common sense like us regular people.
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From what I recall, the stock price will drop by the amount of the quarterly dividend payout amount the last day you are eliguble to get a dividend. As far as I know, there is no set amount of time you have to own the stock, other than 2 business days prior to that date.

I bought Coke stock a day or 2 before this last dividend payment which was on 7/1 and still got the dividend payment on it.
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[QUOTE=rydogg58;14337433]From what I recall, the stock price will drop by the amount of the quarterly dividend payout amount the last day you are eliguble to get a dividend. As far as I know, there is no set amount of time you have to own the stock, other than 2 business days prior to that date.

I bought Coke stock a day or 2 before this last dividend payment which was on 7/1 and still got the dividend payment on it.[/QUOTE

But the stock price is determined by investors buy and sell orders. Right???
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[QUOTE=Hog's Gone Fishin;14337437] Sure, but this is all over my head, so it may have something to do with the SEC. There's money to be made with dividend stocks, but buying them and selling as soon as the dividend is paid doesn't seem to be the smartest way to go. Or else we would all be rich off a guaranteed payout amount every quarter.
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The stock price drops by the amount the dividend is paid out on the execution day.

That's why it makes no sense to buy a dividend stock to hold through payment and then dump it.
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When did you buy them? Most stocks we have are up like 30% since December. Yeah we bought a lot of them more than a year ago, so they went down through the end of 2018. But they've all mostly bounced back and my wife made a genius move to buy Beyond at $80 and we doubled that in a month. Lucky.
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You're partially correct, just a minor correction of the word "drop".

A stock has what is called "Ex-dividend date", normally one BUSINESS day prior to the RECORD date of the dividend being paid.

The stock is ADJUSTED downward for the price of the dividend on EX day, so if you buy it on EX day up to RECORD day, you get NO dividend. :-)

If you buy either Municipal Bonds or Corporate Bonds, it works very different.

They calculate the amount of ACCRUED interest since the last payment (bond payments are paid twice a year, biannual) and then the purchaser of the bond pays the seller the amount of accrued interest up to the record date and then when they get the FULL biannual payment on the next record date, they will have received the correct amount for the time they owned the bond.

As an example, if you had a bond that was a Jan-July payment cycle known as a "1&7" that you bought on Feb 1st, you would owe the seller the interest from Jan 1st until Jan 31st and it would be added to the price of the bond upon purchase.
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I wish I had some savings and 401k. It's tough to have fun on a budget that doesn't include booze, strippers, and gambling. At the same time, the stuff I've read suggests that that isn't necessarily the optimal approach either. If you buy today, you really have no idea if it'll continue to slide (in which case you should've waited even longer), and if you buy tomorrow, you might have lost out on any gains that happened today.
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