The first site you should go to is
www.jsmineset.com and read all you can there about trading. Go into the archives and learn about trend lines, support and resistance, and fibonnacci retracements. There's a lot to Technical Analysis, but since all it does it is tell you what has happened, and not what will happen, there's no need to go too deep into it.
Also, on that site read everything written by Dan Norcini. He posted two articles in there, on what moves the market, and a chart showing the manipulation I referred to.
USERX and UNWPX are mutual funds that you might be able to roll over your 401K and IRA into. If you do a transfer, you won't incur any expenses. You can learn how to invest in them and their philosophy at
www.usfunds.com.
www.kitco.com has streaming charts for the spot marked in Gold and Silver. They even have an applet that streams the price of Gold and Silver onto your taskbar. If you can't find it, give me your e-mail and I'll send it to you.
It is very good to put money away in a 401K, provided that it is invested in the right things. If there is a gold/precious metals fund or resouce fund in industrial metals and engergy, push your savings into those. By all means take as much advantage of the match from your company, and be aware of how long you have to keep it in their accounts. As they permit, take the money and move it into the funds that I mentioned, or any others of a simillar nature that perform as well.
No mutual fund will do as well as you will once you learn to trade. But until you learn, assuming you ever can, it is good to rely on pro's to do the work for you. Most company 401K's don't give you good enough options. Stay away from funds that invest in the S&P 500 or Dow. Investment advisors will think you're crazy to do this, but they are dopes who make their money pushing their recommendations, not making you money. If they were really good at picking stocks, why would they waste their time talking to you?
Most funds are a scam, and most people loose money in investing. The real purpose of the stock market is to transfer money from the outsiders - you and me - and transfer it to the insiders. The only way to protect yourself is to be informed and think for yourself. While no-one knows the future, the better you are able to discern trends early and position yourself to take advantage of them the better you will be at making money. It is hard to make money and the people in the investment communty rely on suckers to make their living. They are snakes, unlike you who tries to earn a living by work. Make sure that you realize they make their lives by preying on you and protect your money by being smart about who you deal with, even if your company trusts them with your money!
By all means got to a bookstore, and spend $20 on an old book called "Reminiscences of a Stock Operator" by Edmin Lefevre. It is actually an autobiography by Jesse Livermore, a guy who learned the game inside and out and made his living as a speculator in the markets. Even though it's old, it contains all the principals to teach you how to make money in the markets.
www.321gold.com has lots of articles on Gold, including a number written by Jeff Kern who specializes in trading the USERX fund using a propritetary index he developed.
www.safehaven.com often has decent articles, look for ones by Steve Saville and Zoron Gayer.
www.prudentbear.com has articles on the economy and the market. I'd recommend them as a fund, but since they don't time the market and short it based on fundamentals, I don't think it's a good place to put money. As you become more informed, learn about options and using them to hedge your bets, or to profit from market downturns. Options provide tremendous leverage, but are also a good way to loose money, as unless the stock you buy your options moves in the right direction fast enough, you will loose money.
Get experience by going to
www.stockcharts.com and putting in symbols of stocks, commodities and mutual funds in and getting charts on their price movements. Look for the annotate link and learn how to do techical analysis for yourself, after reading jsmineset.
Try getting to yahoo and looking up investorsexchange and joining that site. I post there once in a while and you can see some charts that I do. I post under the same name there, so you'll find those easilly.
It is great that you are interested in this so young, as it gives you a head start on a lot of people. The earlier you realize that learning how to make your money work for you the more you will be able to make and hold onto as you get older.
No need to be envious at me. I taught myself how to work on PC's and worked my way up through help desk to deskside support, and hopefully onto network administration and network monitoring. If you apply yourself, I'm sure you can do anything that I did, provided you like doing that type of work.
I used to think working for great companies was the ticket to the good life, but now I'm not so sure. By all means work hard, but realize your working for yourself and your objective is to get them to pay you. Be very good at what you do so your worth the money, and realize that they make their money by getting more out of you than they pay you. Also know that as soon as they decide to save money they will drop you like a cold stone. It has nothing to do with you. Businessmen make mistakes all the time, and most poeple who make personnel decisions make a lot of them, even at good companies. Merck wouldn't be in the trouble they're in if they didn't make mistakes in hiring the wrong people and putting them in the postion to make bad decisions!
IBM used to be on top of the PC world, and they made Microsoft successful, when they themselves could still be on top. Get that! IBM made Microsoft by giving them money for an operating system they got from someone else! IBM didn't recruite the right people to build a better os than Microsoft, even though they tried with OS2. Windows was crap, but it was still better than anything else at the time and it was cheaper than Apple which made stupid decisions too!
Don't be impressed by these guys, simply because they became big. Once upon a time GM was the biggest company in the world, but they stopped innovating and making better cars. Now look at them! Companies become successful, because the right guys get into the right positons and move them forward. Once they leave, the companies often fail to maintain their success. And, it isn't allways the guy at the top that make the difference either. They're jsut the ones who exploit the poeple who create the real value!
