Introduction: Creating a Stock Market Investing Plan
We all need a plan for investing our money. Ask yourself: Do you want to work for money? Or, do you want money to work for you? I know I want my money to work for me. If we’re going to be successful at trading and investing, we need to come up with a plan.
Our investing plan likely includes many different types of investments and strategies for maximizing our gains and profits. This article is an introduction to building our investing plan and will be followed by more in-depth discussion on creating a solid plan.
What can we invest in?
We can invest our money many different ways. Here are some of the more popular investments:
- Stocks
- Bonds
- Real Estate
- Mutual Funds
- IRA
- Trust Funds
- Money Market accounts
Investing Strategies
Just as we have numerous avenues of investing, we also have many different strategies of utilizing these avenues to increase our investing potential.
The more popular investing strategies are:
- Growth Investing
- Value Investing
- International Investing
- Real Assets (real estate, gold, silver, other precious metals, diamonds, etc)
Find the Right Balance
A good investing strategy uses combinations of investing avenues and investing strategies.
We want to formulate an investing strategy which includes long term investments that are likely to grow over time (growth investments), and also stocks or mutual funds that are very good value investments – where we are buying in a good price.
Our strategy should also include investments which pay us money on a regular basis, such as dividend paying stocks, mutual funds, ETFs, bonds, and even real estate. With real estate, you may own an apartment building where tenants pay on a monthly basis. We can use these payments and dividends from our investments to pay our bills or to reinvest and grow our total investments even more.
Thinking Long Term
When you make investments you must be prepared to hold on your investment for a long time. The greatest rewards from investing come as you hold on to your investments over a long time period. Your investment may initially go down and you will be tempted to sell it. Many successful investors would hold on to this knowing that the market always goes up in the long run. It may go down for a year or even two years, but history shows the market steadily rises. And as the market rises, so too do investors’ portfolios.
