Stock Market Investing Blog

Investing in Wal-Mart Stock has shown to be positive lately. On 11/12/09 the company reported a third quarter profit of $3.24 billion. This stock in general follows the economy, so the future is looking up for America.

The stock symbol for Wal-Mart is WMT and the current stock price is at $53.66. The 52 week high and low was $59.23 for the high and $46.25 for the low. The trading volume was 17.7 million shares. The TTM sales were $403,477,000,000.

The major funds that have invested in this stock are the Vanguard Total Stock Market Index with 0.56% shares held with a total % assets of 1.14%. The Vanguard 500 Index Investor with 0.55% shares held and % of total assets at 1.27%. American Funds American Balanced A with 0.45% shares held and 2.02% total assets. The Vanguard Institutional Index with 0.40% shares held and 1.34% total assets and the American Funds Growth Fund of America A with a 0.37% shares held and 0.55% total assets.

The current Wall Street recommendation of this stock is at 1.7 or the buy statues. The declared date of dividends of this stock was 03/06/09 with a dividend amount of 0.2725. The ex-dividend date is 12/09/09 with a projected yield of 2.0%.

The investment options of this stock are either with direct investment or dividend retirement plans.

This company is divided up into three major components. There is the U.S. based Wal-Mart stores that bring in 64% of the revenue from the 3,700 stores. The 3,400 international stores make up 24% of total revenue and the 600 Sam’s Club Stores account for 12% of the revenue.

The current total assets of this stock are at 168,942,000,000. Investing in Wal-Mart Stock is a sound choice for the long term investor but does your own research and makes the decision yourself. Stock market investing is a decision you must make.

When looking for the best balanced funds 2009, investors understand that approximately 60% of the fund is invested in stocks with about 40% in bonds but not always. The manager of the fund makes the final decision.

So far this year to date the best performing balanced fund is Legg Mason ClearBridge Convertible B with a stock symbol of SCVSX. This funds YTD performance is at 61.68%. The present stock price is at $13.31 and has a 52 week high of $13.98 and a low of $7.86. This fund has $50.8 million in assets and is a Mid Growth investment style of fund. The Morningstar risk factor is high and the return is average. 1.4% of this fund is in cash, 4.5% in stocks, 3.2 in bonds and 90.9 in a category of other.

The next best performing balanced fund is Fidelity Convertible Securities with a stock symbol of FCVSX. This funds YTD performance is at 53.56%. The present stock price is at $20.66 with a 52 week high of $21.74 and a low of $12.16. This fund has $2.3 billion in assets and is a large value investment style of fund. The Morningstar risk factor is high and the return is average. This funds allocation are 10.3% in cash, 11.9% in stocks, 9.7% in bonds, 68.2% in other and 1.2% of the stocks are foreign.

The third best performing balanced fund is Calamos Evolving World Growth I with a stock symbol of CNWIX. This funds YTD performance is at 48.73%. The present stock price is at $10.56 and has a 52 week high of $10.98 and a low of $6.09. This fund has $42.2 million in assets and is a Large Growth investment style of fund. The Morningstar risk factor and return factor has not been rated because this fund is just over a year old. This funds allocation are 2.5% in cash, 76.39% in stocks, 1.2% in bonds, 20.0% in other and 71.6% of the stocks are foreign.

When Stock Market investing, make sure you do your own research. As of 11/5/09 these are the best balanced funds 2009.

This Natural Gas ETF Guide tries to explain this complicated form of investing. Because of the physical nature of natural gas actually being in a gaseous state, transporting it and storing it is not like any other commodity. The funds that actual invest in the resource are in the futures market. This is the reason why the spot price of natural gas and the ETF price of the futures market at times are not even close.

Earlier this year a small player in this market was UNG. With the recession fully underway, many investors were looking for a safe place to investment their money. This fund started the year at $100 million but quickly grew to $4 billion. This caught the eye of the regulatory commission and hearings were held. The findings have not been announced yet but it is expected that the commission will set limits on how much influence a fund will have on manipulating the price of a finite supplied commodity like natural gas.

No matter what is decided on, supply and demand will be the major influence on the price of this community as with all things that are bought and sold.

New techniques and discoveries are taking place all the time, the production of natural gas and the amounts that have been recovered are growing steadily. With the recession in full swing and the manufacturing sector demanding less and less each day, the limit to the storage capacity of this commodity has nearly reached its limit.

Natural gas is traded in MMBtu or 10,000 million British thermal units and the present price per unit is $4.947. With the price so low and the supply so high naturally someone will find a way to utilize this valuable resource. When that happens, the investors that look at the long term approach and have made an investment in the Natural gas ETF, guide the future with their profits.

The Vanguard ETF Funds are a group of funds that span from the domestic market to a select targeted group of international markets. These exchange traded funds are a total of 39 different funds under this umbrella to choose from for your investing dollars.

The newest of these funds is the Vanguard FTSE All-World ex-US Small-Cap ETF and was created on 04/02/09 and has an annualized rate of return since that point of 53.16%. The current stock price is $84.10 with the symbol VSS. This fund has invested in 2324 different stocks around the world with total net assets at $282.1 million.

The World Stock EFT has a symbol of VT and has a current stock price of $43.42. Its inception date was 06/24/08 and has had an annualized return since that point of -12.14%.There are 2744 different stocks from around the world in this fund with a total net assets of $607.0 million.

The Vanguard Europe Pacific EFT has a symbol of VEA and has a current stock price of $35.55. Its inception date was 07/20/07. There are 943 stocks from Europe and the Pacific area invested in with this fund. The total net assets of $5.7 billion dollars of this fund have shown an annualized return since its inception of -13.56%.

The Vanguard FTSE All-World ex-US Index EFT has a current stock price of $44.93 and the symbol is VEU. Since its inception date of 03/02/07 the annualized rate of return has been -4.14%. There are 2148 different stocks in this fund from around the world with $6.6 billion in total net assets.

The Vanguard Emerging Markets ETF has a symbol of VWO and has a current stock market price of $40.69. Since this fund’s inception on 03/04/05 it has had an annualized return of 12.20%. There are 790 stocks that are entirely from emerging markets in this fund that has total net assets of $26.0 billion.

When taking your money and Stock Market Investing in funds, do your own research, but the information on these Vanguard ETF Funds are accurate and truthful as of 10/21/09.

Investing in Gold Mining Stocks during an economic recession is a smart move. The sooner you invest, the lower the price. For those of you that have been watching the gold market since the trouble or greed of the banking system started a couple of years ago have seen the price of gold do nothing but rise.

In October of 2006 the price of gold per ounce was around $600. Toda, as the market closes for the week in mid October 2009, the price of gold is at $1052.80. This is how history repeats itself, every time the stock market has problems, gold and other precious metals increase in values because they are real and not just a piece of paper that can become worthless in an instant.

Gold will always have value and gold mining companies like Goldcorp, Barrick and Newmont Mining will always be solid investments. There are times and instances where a company makes an investment outside what they know like Barrick did last year in an oil company. They lost money but that was only temporary and their stock did not suffer too much.

With the insider trading scam again hitting Wall Street Stock Market, investing in gold mining stocks is becoming the only investment that is showing a consistent return on investment.

Goldcorp current stock price is at $42.40. Barrick current stock price is at $38.66 and Newmont Mining stock price is at $46.64. Each of these stocks are well established and have large known resources.

Investing in bonds is not easy to learn.  There are a lot of terms that are unique to bonds that aren’t common in other areas of investing.  This post is designed to introduce you to a lot of the terms associated with investing in bonds.  This will give you a solid foundation in the basics of investing in bonds.

Accrued Interest – The interest that has been earned, but not paid out to the bondholder. Bond interest accrues equally every day and does not compound.

Call Date - Some bonds have a provision that give the issuer the ability to redeem the bond early. There is usually one call date per year. The list of dates is called the “call schedule.”

Call Premium – The payment by the bond issuer if the bond is called before the maturity date. This is the incentive that makes bond investors look at callable bonds compared to non-callable ones.

Coupon Payment – The actual dollar amount paid to the bondholders at each coupon date.

Coupon Rate – The annual interest rate paid to bondholders. Rates are generally fixed, though variable rate bonds are available.

Current Yield – The annual interest payment divided by the current market price of the bond.

Discount - This is when a bond is sold at a discount to its face value.

Face Value – Also called the principal or par value of the bond, this is the amount that will be repaid when the bond matures.

Maturity Date – The day in which the last interest payment is made, and the face value of the bond will be repaid.

Real Rate of Return - The combination of the interest earned and the market value of the bond.

Term to Maturity – The time left until the bond matures and the principal is repaid.

Yield to Call – This is the calculated yield from the current time until the call date. It is assumed that the bond will be called at the next call date.

Yield to Maturity – The compound average annual expected rate of return if the bond is purchased at its current market price and held to maturity. It is assumed in the calculation that the interest payments are reinvested for the life of the bond at the same yield. This is also called the internal rate of return of the bond.

Yield to Worst – This is a “worst case scenario” in terms of yield on a bond. It is the lowest yield possible for a bond.

This should give you a good primer of the basics of investing in bonds.  Like I said, investing in bonds involves a lot of terms that are unique to the bond market.  Hopefully this post give you the basics that are needed for bond investing.

Figuring out how to start stock market investing can be difficult for beginning investors.  Any time you endeavor to do something new some anxiety is expected.  However, since you are reading this blog, you are well on your way to learning how to start investing.

Before you start investing, I highly recommend that you get your finances organized.  You need to make sure that you have a strong financial foundation in place before you risk money in the stock market.

Investing in the stock market involves risk, and you need to be prepared to lose money.

6 Month Emergency Fund

So, first, I recommend that you have an adequate emergency fund in place before you start investing.  Having an emergency fund which you have in a safe and liquid savings account or money market account is really important.  The size of emergency fund you start is entirely up to you, but 6 months of living expenses or 6 months of salary is a common recommendation.

Invest in Companies 401k

The first way you should start investing in the stock market is through your company’s 401k or through a retirement account like a IRA or Roth IRA.  If you company offers a contribution matching benefit, you definitely need to take advantage of this by investing in your company’s 401k up to the top of the matching contribution limit.

Investing in the Stock Market

Once you have an emergency fund in place and are investing in your retirement account of choice, you can start stock market investing through buying individual equities, bonds and mutual funds.

A great way to get started is to set an investing goal of some set dollar per month.  To get started investing you might want to save $100 a month to fund a brokerage account.  If you can save more, all the better.

Once you have around $1,000 or $2,000 saved you can start investing in stock and bonds.  Keep reading the Stock Market Investing Blog to learn more about where you can invest.  We will provide lots of guide to help beginners to learn how to start investing.

Investing in Africa

While Africa has never been a magnet for attracting investors, there are some very interesting investment opportunities that are opening up.  If you are interested in international investment opportunities, investing in Africa is something you should consider.

Africa ETF Funds

While there are not a lot of Africa ETF Funds, the ones that do exist are pretty interesting and you should become acquainted with them.  Hopefully, this article will help you to investigate some Africa ETF Funds that you have not heard of before.

Africa ETF List

1. MSCI South Africa Index Fund (EZA) -
   If you are looking to invest in South African companies, the MSCi South Africa Index fund is a good ETF to consider.
2. Van Eck Africa ETF (AFK) – This Africa ETF is great for someone looking to invest in an ETF that invests in companies all of the continent of Africa.
3. SPDR S&P Emerging Middle East and Africa ETF (GAF) – While this ETF is not limited to Africa, it is designed to mirror the S&P Middle East and Africa BMI Index.  The S&P Middle East and Africa BMI Index is an index designed to represent the entire public market of traded companies in the Middle East and Africa.
4. PowerShares MENA Frontier Countries Portfolio (PMNA) – The PowerShares MENA Frontier Countries Portfolio focuses on investing in the countries of  Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar, UAE, Oman, Lebanon, Egypt, Jordan and Morocco.  As you can tell, most of these MENA countries are in the Middle East, this Africa ETF Fund still provides some opportunities for investing in Africa.

This Africa ETF List is not designed to be exhaustive, but instead provide you with a starting place for investing in Africa ETF funds.  If you want to tell us about other Africa ETFs that you are looking at, please tell us about them in the comments below.

I would like to welcome you to the Stock Market Investing Blog.  This site is dedicated to providing top notch stock market investing guides, commentary and opinions.

My goal for this site is to help both beginner investors and advanced investors.  Some of the article will be basic investing guides.  Others will be more in depth advanced tactics for seasoned investors.

Investing in the stock market is exciting and reading about investment strategies can be a lot of fun.  I hope that I get you coming back time and time again for more information.

Everyday the stock market is changing.  Certain companies that used to be a value are now at a stock price that is overvalued.  Certain investing strategies work a certain times and others at other times.

Hopefully, this site will be your first stop for seeing these trends.  I also hope to develop an active community here.  So, please leave your comments and thoughts about the topics covered.  Through the two-way dialogue we will learn from each other.

I hope you enjoy the Stock Market Investing Blog!!