What has Experience Investing In The Stock Market Taught You?

 With over forty years of investing in the stock market behind me there are lots of things that I have learned.

Maybe not how to dress well. The one key to investing is to know yourself.

I know that I am not the best dressed, but I love my Black Lab, Leif and this shirt is pretty comfortable.

But  anyway.  Investing.

Well investing requires self knowledge.

Why?  I tell you in this video.

Beside all the information in the video.  I have learned that you need to consider investing as a long term plan for wealth creation.  There are hundreds of people a day who will tell you that they have the answer to get you rich overnight.  Well generally their get rich quick schemes mean you give them your money to learn something that you could have got for free.  No one looks after your money as well as you do.

Always look for quality stocks, they pay well in the long run.

Feel free to set aside some play money, but don't play with your main investment accounts.

Play only with money that you can afford to lose.  Protect your core accounts.

 

 

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Lab Dad Black Labrador Retriever T-Shirt
 

I have created a core brokerage savings account with M1 Finance. This account is for doing fun stuff.

 

M1 allows me to buy fractional shares, so I can afford to buy high priced stock like Amazon (AMZN ), Alphabet (GOOG ) and others.  I built a core account of just over thirty stocks in January 2020 starting with just $100, plus a $30 bonus because I followed an affiliate link like this one.  Now that core holding is worth in excess of  $1,400 and is paying me regular dividend income.  I invest just $17 per week and everything is invested automatically. Simple

 

You too can open an M1 account and earn a $30 bonus when you use this link. 

 

 

What am I Buying on September 7, 2021?

 Today is the first day of trading after the Labor Day Holiday.  September is often seen as a bad month to buy stock.  But today I was off to my brokerage accounts and buying quite briskly.

In my M1 account I had several purchases.  Now these were pre-programmed purchases. My cash balance was over $25 and so the brokerage account went out to buy some of the stocks at the bottom of my various pies.

In my Thirty Share fund I bought both Visa and Mastercard. I hold both of these stocks because they are the powerhouse stocks as suppliers of credit and debit cards.  Between them they have over 85% of the market.  They are not the greatest dividend payers, instead putting a lot of their free cash back into their business.  But they do pay small dividends which will never make me rich but I do get a respectable return which I do not see being cut any time soon.

Another automated purchase was for shares of stock in Medtronic.  This stock had lagged a little, possibly due to the reduction in elective surgeries in hospitals over the past eighteen months. Now as I believe corona virus cases will soon fall to more balanced levels, thee virus is with us now and we will have to live with it forever.  But heart and circulatory surgery will come back and this is where Medtronic earns its daily bread.  I personally have a Medtronic pacemaker and have for eight years now.

Take a look at the bestselling investing books at my Amazon Store ( Click Here ).

I also took a wander to see my Fidelity account.  Now this brokerage has had no additional cash added for a while now.  All my spare cash goes  to my M1 account.  But the Fidelity account does have some dividend paying stocks.

To my surprise I had built up almost $56 in cash.  I saw that my account there, at Fidelity, has the ability to buy fractional shares for free.  Last time I looked this was only available on the iPhone app.  Not wanting to put more cash in the stocks I already hold there I thought a while and decided to buy VOO, the Vanguard S&P 500 exchange traded fund (ETF ).

I already own SPY, the State Street version of this ETF in my Roth IRA account. So didn't want to own that again.  The VOO will add more stock to my Fidelity account, much of it is based in California Tax Free  Municipal Bonds. In the form of CMF.

As VOO was over $450 this morning and I only bought $54.88, I get only a small fraction, a little over 10% of a share, so only 10% of the dividend later this month.  That is okay with me.  It's an opening position and now I know that I can buy those fractional shares at Fidelity as well I will certainly be back.