MARKETS,Anybody even yet?

[olds442jetaway]

Cool charts. I did good with nem in the 80s and 90s. Took my money and ran.

[dinghy]

I did good with nem in the 80s and 90s.

That was before my time. Totally different era for access to information and costs.

I always want to be aware of what can go wrong. Here's NEM from the 87 crash:



Intraday from Thursday to Tuesday, NEM plunged 60%. It didn't fully recover the loss until 1996.

GE dropped about 30% during the same 3-session span. Data from Yahoo Finance.

[olds442jetaway]

If I remember, I bought it in the low 40s in the late 80s and got out in the low 50s before the dive somewhere in the late 90s. I have been trading ( many times not successfully ) since the mid 1970s. All of my big hits were due to fraud or at least that’s the way I took it. It is hard to believe that back then most people would go through a broker like Merrill Lynch for their trades and pay a couple of hundred bucks in commission just to buy a couple of thousand dollars worth of a stock. Because of that I didn’t get into it at a higher level until the discount brokers came out And the fees were somewhere around 25 bucks per trade, but now it cost me nothing or maybe $.10 or so for some kind of a securities fee I forget what they call it. In the late 70s and early 80s when CDs were as high as 18.5 percent due to inflation, ( thank you Jimmy Carter ) I just forgot about the market entirely. I am part of the old generation that believed if you can’t pay for it, you do without and don’t get it, the exact opposite of the gen z rs and millennials or whatever they are being called nowadays.

[dinghy]

I am part of the old generation that believed if you can’t pay for it, you do without and don’t get it, the exact opposite of the gen z rs and millennials or whatever they are being called nowadays.

I call them communists.

I initially went the mutual fund route. Vanguard had the best selection of "no-load" funds. Vanguard didn't have celebrity stock pickers (a la Peter Lynch), but I was content with their index funds. That would have been within the era of attractive interest rates, so like you (iirc) I was more into bonds than stocks.

I didn't do individual stocks until later. With relatively limited access to information, I didn't feel I had any edge picking stocks. For those early transactions, I think I paid as much as $20 commission per trade. As you referenced though, commissions were crazy high for much of the 20th century.

It's funny because government schools teach us that government regulators keep prices low and prevent monopolies. But why is it that prices go down when an industry is "deregulated"? As I'm reading, until 1975 the brokerage industry was basically an SEC-sanctioned cartel with enforcement of minimum (rather than maximum) prices.

A 1975 SEC amendment abolished the restrictions and opened the door for discount brokers. Today we have widely available zero commissions and I believe the tightest-ever bid-ask spreads.

[dinghy]

1-day map, S&P 500:



NEM green!

It's a start.

All sectors red today. Least bad was energy.

[FAA]

-1.9%, -2.1%, -2.55%. I was -1% today.

[FAA]

-0.5%, -0.2%, 0. I was -0.1% today. Processing three days of pain.

[dinghy]

Adding more VZ down near 43.

[dinghy]

CCJ Cameco +15% on news that Japan is constructive on nuclear construction.

I own it, but missed my opportunity to add more. Was waiting for a little more of a pullback.

[FAA]

If you ever meet a happy Verizon investor, let us know. Pick any chart. It has not made money in up to a 20 year span. Twenty years of dead money. Enjoy the dividend, I guess.