乐视2通话声音小:晨星投资课程-1. Stocks Versus Other Investments

1. Stocks Versus Other Investments [ZZ]

101-Stocks Versus Other Investments
  Stocks 100
  Get in on the ground floor of stock investing by learning how stocks work and
  what it means to be a shareholder.
  
  Course 101:
  Stocks Versus Other Investments
  We all have financial goals in life: to pay for college for our children, to
  be able to retire by a reasonable age, to buy the things we want.
  Unfortunately, spending less than we earn is typically not enough for us to
  reach our goals. We have to do more; we have to invest our savings and put our
  money to work. Stocks are quite simply one of the best ways to make your
  investment dollars work the hardest.
  Investing in stocks is not rocket science. The only real characteristics
  shared among successful stock investors are basic math skills, a critical eye,
  patience, and discipline. Combine these with an understanding of how money
  flows and how businesses compete with one another, along with a dash of
  accounting knowledge, and you have all the mental tools needed to get started.
  We will teach you all these in this workbook series.
  Although you don't need an advanced college degree to invest in stocks,
  selecting stocks is nevertheless an intellectual exercise. It requires effort,
  but it can bear many fruits. After all, investing in stocks not only leads to
  potentially higher returns on your investment dollars, it also leads to a
  greater understanding of how the world works.
  
  What Is a Stock?
  Perhaps the most common misperception among new investors is that stocks are
  simply pieces of paper to be traded. This is simply not the case. In stock
  investing, trading is a means, not an end. A stock is an ownership interest in
  a company. A business is started by a person or small group of people who put
  their money in. How much of the business each founder owns is a function of
  how much money each invested. At this point, the company is considered
  "private." Once a business reaches a certain size, the company may decide to
  "go public" and sell a chunk of itself to the investing public. This is how
  stocks are created. When you buy a stock, you become a business owner. Period.
  Over the long term, the value of that ownership stake will rise and fall
  according to the success of the underlying business. The better the business
  does, the more your ownership stake will be worth.
  
  Why Invest in Stocks?
  Stocks are but one of many possible ways to invest your hard-earned money. Why
  choose stocks instead of other options, such as bonds, rare coins, or antique
  sports cars? Quite simply, the reason that savvy investors invest in stocks is
  that they provide the highest potential returns. And over the long term, no
  other type of investment tends to perform better. On the downside, stocks tend
  to be the most volatile investments. This means that the value of stocks can
  drop in the short term. Sometimes stock prices may fall for a protracted
  period. For instance, those who put all their savings in stocks in early 2000
  are probably still underwater today. Bad luck or bad timing can easily sink
  your returns, but you can minimize this by taking a long-term investing
  approach. There's also no guarantee you will actually realize any sort of
  positive return. If you have the misfortune of consistently picking stocks
  that decline in value, you can lose money, even over the long term! Of course,
  we think that by educating yourself and using the knowledge in this Investing
  Classroom, you can make the risk acceptable relative to your expected reward.
  We will help you pick the right businesses to own and help you spot the ones
  to avoid. Again, this effort is well worth it, because over the long haul,
  your money can work harder for you in equities than in just about any other
  investment.
  
  
  Your Investment Choices
  Let's see how stocks stack up to some of your other investment options:
  Mutual Funds. Stock mutual funds can offer similar returns to investing in
  stocks on your own, but without all the extra work. When you invest in a fund,
  your money is pooled with that of other investors, and then it is managed by a
  group of professionals who try to earn a return by selecting stocks for the
  pool. Beyond requiring much less effort, one key advantage of funds is that
  they can be less volatile.
  Simple statistics says that a portfolio is going to experience less volatility
  than the individual components of the portfolio. After all, individual stocks
  can and sometimes do go to zero, but if a mutual fund held 50 stocks, it would
  be very unlikely that all 50 of those stocks become worthless. The flipside of
  this reduced volatility is that fund returns can be muted relative to
  individual stocks.
  In investing, risk and return are intimately correlated—reduce one, and odds
  are you will reduce the other. Another disadvantage to offloading all the
  effort of picking individual stocks is that you must pay someone else for this
  service. The professionals running mutual funds do not do so for free. They
  charge fees, and fees eat into returns. Plus, the more money you have invested
  in mutual funds, the larger the absolute value of fees you will pay every
  year. For instance, paying 1% a year in fees on a $1,000 portfolio is not a
  big deal, but it's a much larger deal if the portfolio is worth $500,000.
  In the past, mutual funds often made the most sense for those with relatively
  small amounts to invest because they were the most cost-efficient. But with
  the advent of $10 (or less) per-trade commissions on stocks, this is no longer
  necessarily the case. Just as picking the wrong stock is a risk, so is picking
  the wrong fund. What if the group of people you selected to manage your
  investment does not perform well? Just like stocks, there is no guarantee of a
  return in mutual funds.
  It's also worth noting that investing in a mix of mutual funds and stocks can
  be a perfectly prudent strategy. Stocks versus funds (or any other investment
  vehicle) need not be an either/or proposition.
  
  Bonds. At their most basic, bonds are loans. When you buy a bond, you become a
  lender to an institution, and that institution pays you interest. As long as
  the institution does not go bankrupt, it will also pay back the principal on
  the bond, but no more than the principal. There are two basic types of bonds:
  government bonds and corporate bonds. U.S. government bonds (otherwise known
  as T-bills or Treasuries) are issued and guaranteed by Uncle Sam. They
  typically offer a modest return with low risk. Corporate bonds are issued by
  companies and carry a higher degree of risk (should the company default) as
  well as return. Bond investors must also consider interest rate risk. When
  prevailing interest rates rise, the market value of existing bonds tends to
  fall. (The opposite is also true.)
  The only way to alleviate interest rate risk is by holding the bond to
  maturity. Investing in corporate bonds also tends to require just as much
  homework as stock investing, yet bonds generally have lower returns. Given
  their lower risk, there is certainly a place for bonds or bond mutual funds in
  most portfolios, but their relative safety comes with the price of lower
  expected returns compared with stocks over the long term.
  
  Real Estate. Most people's homes are indeed their largest investments. We all
  have to live somewhere, and a happy side effect is that real estate tends to
  appreciate in value over time. But if you are going to use real estate as a
  true investment vehicle by buying a second home, a piece of land, or a rental
  property, it's important to keep the following in mind. First, despite the
  exceptionally strong appreciation real estate values have had the past several
  years, real estate can and does occasionally decline in value.
  Second, real estate taxes will constantly eat into returns. Third, real estate
  owners must worry about physically maintaining their properties or must pay
  someone else to do it. Likewise, they often must deal with tenants and collect
  rents. Finally, real estate is rather illiquid and takes time to sell—a
  potential problem if you need your money back quickly. Some people do nothing
  but invest their savings in real estate and do quite well. But just as stock
  investing requires effort, so does real estate investing.
  
  Bank Savings Accounts. The problem with bank savings accounts and certificates
  of deposit is that they offer very low returns. The upside is that there is
  essentially zero risk in these investment vehicles, and your principal is
  protected. These types of accounts are fine as rainy-day funds—a place to park
  money for short-term spending needs or for an emergency. But they really
  should not be viewed as long-term investment vehicles. The low returns of
  these investments are a problem because of inflation. For instance, if you get
  a 3% return on a savings account, but inflation is also dropping the buying
  power of your dollar by 3% a year, you really aren't making any money. Your
  real return (return adjusted for inflation) is zero, meaning that your money
  is not really working for you.
  
  The Bottom Line
  Though investing in stocks may indeed require more work and carry a higher
  degree of risk compared with other investment opportunities, you cannot ignore
  the higher potential return that stocks provide. And as we will show in the
  next lesson, given enough time, a slightly higher return on your investments
  can lead to dramatically larger dollar sums for whatever your financial goals
  in life may be.