A history of the Stock Market as I see it

I figure if I'm going to try to learn how to participate in the great adventure that is the market, it can't hurt to learn about it. As I said before, I'm not here to teach. I'm here to learn and I would be more than glad if others want to learn along with me and/or correct me if needed and give some input as well.

So, I give you a brief history of the market (as I see it while doing this research). In 1792, twenty four stock brokers signed a treaty called the Buttonwood Agreement that basically laid out the rules for buying and selling stocks and bonds. Twenty five years later, in 1817, the first constitution was drafted from the Buttonwood Agreement and the New York Stock & Exchange Board was born. In 1863 this name was shortened to the more familiar New York Stock Exchange, and five years after the seats on this prestigious board become a hot commodity. Fast forward 138 years later and the NYSE went both public and electronic, it merged with Archipelago Holdings, an electronic securities and formed the NYSE Group in 2006. The next year NYSE Group merged with Euronext N.V, a European electronic stock exchange based in Amsterdam and formed the NYSE Euronext in 2007.

There are a few other exchanges that you may or may not be interested that exist in this conglomerate. One such exchange is the NYSE Arca. This is a fully electronic stock exchange, connecting many different traders with the markets that they want to trade in. In order to ensure a smooth processing, the traders within this exchange must meet certain requirements in order to be allowed to continue trading.

The next exchange, the NYSE MKT is the market used primarily for small and micro cap companies. The requirements for this exchange is adjusted to the smaller companies it works with.

The other major exchange is ArcaEdge. This is a quick, efficient way to trade over-the-counter stocks. These are stocks that don't quite meet the requirements to make a listing on the formal exchanges. That said, these can be high risk stocks because of their nature. They tend to be penny stocks or possibly companies with bad credit records.

I think that's enough history for now. Thanks for reading

Until next time,
PDC

Market Positions

I only have 3 market positions at the moment, and most of that is due to money availability. 

The first item that I put money in initially is my $250 position in ANOIX. This is a small cap growth fund managed by American Century. My original thought was that I didn't really want to pay the commission to invest in ETF's or anything like that, but a couple weeks out I thought about it and decided that the annual fee of 1.4% was too much for me, because I don't believe that I need my money to be actively managed yet (not until I'm filthy rich, ya know?). I'm using Sharebuilder as my broker, and unless I want to lose $50 for early withdrawal, I'm going to leave my money in there for the rest of the 90 days it needs to be in there before I take it out, but it seems to be doing pretty well in there so far, so I'm not complaining. 

Next, after I saved up some more money, I put $120 into 2 ETF's. The first is CSD, the Guggenheim Spinoff ETF. This invests its money into fairly new spinoff companies who are at least 6 months old, if I recall correctly. I wanted to keep my investments mostly in the small to midcap range, so I decided that this was a perfect candidate, not to mention the 50% return over the last year. 

Finally, I decided to put $120 into the ETF IWL. This is the iShares Russel Top 200 ETF. Despite my just saying that I wanted to keep my investments mostly in small to mid cap stocks, I realized that it's good to have some large cap in your portfolio as well. I picked this one because not only was it a decent performer at 26% over the last year and 16% over the last 3, but I wanted something that was going to pay dividends that I could reinvest.

Basically, my research has been limited to returns and a basic understanding of cap sizes. There are a few things that I plan on changing a little while down the line though. First off, I think that I'm going to move my IWL investment into MGC. This is the Vanguard Mega Cap ETF. It's the same investment premise, only it has a lot more trading volume to it and I will be a little more comfortable with that. As far as the $250 I put in ANOIX, I still haven't really decided what I want to do with that yet. I have also thought about the possibility of investing in DIA, which is the Dow Jones ETF. I'm not sure if I want to do that yet though because I already have some large cap exposure for the time being. I may end up putting it into a high yield bond fund. I like the idea of having dividends, and I know I need to diversify a little bit, as all of my positions are in US equity. Oh well, there'll be time for that later. 

Have a good day everyone, I gotta go

PDC

My Relationship With the Market

So, just how new am I to this whole thing? I've had money in the market for a whole 2 months now, and had done some very basic prior research in the past, but nothing comprehensive. Since I started, I have gotten more into it, hence the interest in keeping a journal of my findings here. At the moment, I have a total of $490 in the market, and am up a whole 2.75% (whoo hoo!). I originally put $250 into a mutual fund, then decided that for the time being I liked ETF's better and put the next $240 into two of those. The majority of my limited portfolio is mid cap stocks via ETF's and the mutual fund. I'll go into detail next time, but it's getting late and I have class in the morning.

Night everyone, may the markets be ever in your favor (guess what I watched?)

PDC

A Little Introduction

Hi, my name is Jeremy Reeves. I've always wanted to start a blog, but my problem with doing this was having a regular stream of ideas to write about. I recently became interested in investing and have since started saving up a little money each paycheck to put into the market to grow as time goes on. I believe that it would be interesting to have a journal of sorts to follow this journey that I am taking so that I can look back at what I have learned and maybe help others along the way if I am lucky. I'd like to think I know quite a bit about investing, but I have only begun to scratch the surface, so there will be plenty to read about.

If I had to guess as to the type of blog this is going to be, I would say informational, but I can't really guarantee that there will always be some core value or lesson to be learned. I had to give a little bit of though to the name, but I settled on Punch Drunk Capitalism because every time I start to get a grasp on one thing, there's something else right there ready to teach me a lesson. I'm always reading new things that lead me to other things that I can look into learning about, and I want to share my musings on the things I stumble across with other people. There is just so much to learn, and so much information to process that I feel that this may help me to learn it better, and help bring this information to others interested in this fascinating subject.

My goal is to hopefully post once a week for now. Although I keep a general eye on the market throughout the day, I'm not to the point yet where I can really come up with an entire posts worth of information unless it's a particularly eventful day. If I can stick with this, I will hopefully be posting at least once a week.

Here's to a good December and prosperous new year.

PDC- Punch Drunk Capitalist