Free stock software downloads and resources

Are you wondering what stocks are good to invest in?

Back in 2000 there was a movie called "Frequency", about a son, played by Dennis Quaid, communicating through some science-fiction-time-like radio to his father. One of the characters, Gordo Hersch played by Noah Emmerich, was radioed "Yahoo" from the future.

He remembered this sage advice and became quite rich as a consequence. Aside from the logical difficulties with causality violating time-travel, this illustrates another interesting point. If Gordo kept his money in Yahoo, a year later he would have had only about a tenth of it remaining. Sorry Gordo, but if you take financial advice from some wacky radio, you've probably got bigger problems. Yahoo like many dot-com stocks showed incredible volatility, not only from one year to the next, but one day to the next.

Barring any reliable messages from the future, any sound investor would be foolish to put all their money on one stock. That's why people invest in a bunch, or "portfolio" of stocks to try to minimize Gordo's little Yahoo mishap. What you want is a number of stocks that are good to invest in, since some of them will turn out to be duds.

Suppose you were to invest in Amazon as well, then perhaps when Yahoo, was going down, Amazon would be going up? Unfortunately, they seem to track each other pretty well. on the time scale of a year. You wouldn't be doing yourself as much good as you'd think.

Amazon or Yahoo are both great companies, and if you were given advice to invest in them in 1999, in hindsight that'd be pretty good. However it's very hard to time the best point to pull out. A lot of very intelligent people lost their shirts. Some people did pull out, sometimes too early, and sometimes too late, and did pretty well, but this is a dangerous and tricky game to play.

Searching around the internet for "free stock evaluation" is folly. If someone really knew that a stock was going to go up, would they really be offering such a service? Anyway, this is not the way investing works. There are very few sure things in this world, particular when it comes to investment.

So what stocks are good to invest in? The answer that is most sensible, is a lot of them, and hopefully a lot more than just one stock, or two that are closely related. By investing in many companies at the same time, you can reduce the risk from getting Yahoo'd.