Posts Tagged ‘shares’
While taking a life insurance plan to cover your death benefits, you will certainly get a number of options from your insurance agent. But how do you select the optimum one? What are the feasible options as your budget and future planning is concerned?
Know your insurance options:
Let me tell you, it is never an easy task to deal with such risk-return trade off. First, you need to decide your financial goal. The death benefit plan can have two options for you to select. Either, you expect good return on your investments (the annual premiums) or just accept it as financial protection tool. For the first one, premium amount would be higher than the second one.
Simply put, the first insurance plan has dual benefit i.e. Return on Investment plus death benefit, which is called as Whole life insurance. Here a part of your premium goes to the investment fund like shares, mutual fund, stocks etc for funding.
In the second plan, the policy pays the monetary benefits to your beneficiaries upon your death which is named as Term life insurance. This is the most inexpensive insurance scheme as far as premium amount is concerned. You can get a number of insurance advisors to avail cheap term life insurance.
Now both the options may look lucrative if you know which one to use, when and how. It all depends on your income stability, saving pattern, insurance need and risk tolerance ability.
For example, if a 30 year old healthy man registers a policy with a death benefit of $30, 0000 he can apply for both the options: Whole life and Term life. In case of Whole life insurance policy the annual premium would be $3000, whereas to gain the same death benefit, Term life insurance would cost him only $300 per year.
Here is a point to be noted that in case of Whole life policy, the premium would remain same through out the life, whereas it will increase in Term life as you grow older. So, at the age of 70 years you may end up paying $ 12,000 per year as opposed to $ 300 which you started with.
Another advantage of the Whole life policy is that you can utilize the accrued money on demand. You can also borrow it from your investment funds anytime you wish.
Since both the options are viable, you have to judicially choose the apt one for your family. Initially you may start with term insurance for the basic securities, then think of pouring additional funds to get a whole life policy, where you can choose your investment option. For term life, you will have different options like annual, 7-year and 10-year policies. In annual term policies, premium would be higher. So it is advisable to ask Term life insurance quotes for at least 7 or 10 years.
Before go to the strategies, please allow me reviewing what short selling means.
When you buy stock, it implies you believe that the stock’s price is going to rise. Conversely, when you go short it implies that you are anticipating a decrease in stock’s price.
In futures, commodities or forex, you are able to choose whether you want to go long or go short since you are dealing with contracts. Short sell stock, in the other hand, is selling of a stock that you do not own.
When you short sell a stock, your broker will lend it to you. Sooner or later then, you must “close” or “cover” the short by buying back the same number of shares to return them to your broker. Generally, you need margin trading account in order to sell short.
You will gain profit if the price drops, so you can buy back the stock at the lower. By the way, if the price of the stock rises, you will lose money since you have to buy it back with the higher price.
Basically, a strategy for selling short is to sell short when the chart pattern indicate a price reversal. For swing traders, they will sell short when the price reach its resistance levels. The stock that its price raises steeper in uptrend, the steeper falls when it is in downtrend.
You can still use the same indicators that you use to buy a stock for short selling. But you have to reverse the reading. When you sell short, you want all indicators showing weakness.
For example, you have to look for declining of moving averages and overbought oscillators. Also for the volume, you have to look for the stock that is falling with strong volume.
Here is the trigger list for short selling.
1) Market conditions are negative
2) Poor company fundamental
3) Industry is in downtrend
4) The price has formed a reversal pattern
5) Strong volume when the price breaks down
6) The price is traded under moving averages and is not able to penetrate them
7) Oscillators indicate overbought conditions
Like buying a stock, you also need to set your stop loss for your short selling. When you place stop for short selling you have to place it above the entry price. You may place it few ticks over previous resistance, or place it few ticks above highest price of the day if you are swing traders.
There are numerous ways to determine the value of a company. When you can determine it’s value, you can then determine the value of its traded shares. The most basic way to do it is to look at the company’s market value, which is also referred to as its market capitalization, or market cap.
So how do you calculate a company’s market capitalization? It’s not as diffuclut as you might think. It’s simply the number of shares a company has outstanding multiplied by the current share price. So as an example, if a company has a million shares outstanding and its current share price is $15, the company’s market cap is $15 million…Simple eh?
How large a company is can be measured by its market cap. Here’s a list of the the five basic stock categories of market capitalization:
1) Micro cap – These are companies that are under $250 million. These stocks are the smallest available and tend to be the most risky.
2) Small cap – These companies are worth $250 million to $1 billion dollars. The stocks of these companies are less risky than micro caps, but still have a lot of growth potential. However, the key word in this description is “potential”, so still make sure you do your homework!
3) Mid cap – Mid cap companies have a value of $1 billion to $5 billion. This kind of company gives investors a good compromise between the small and large cap companies. This gives the investor the chance to invest in a company that have have a degree of safetly found in large cap companies while still having some of the growth potential of a small cap company
4) Large cap – these companies are referred to as “blue chips” and have a worth of $5 billion to $25 billion. These companies are more for conservative investors as they appreciate on a steady rate and are relatively safe.
5) Ultra cap – These caps can also be referred to as “mega caps” and are the real “big boys” of the share market. Companies such as General Electric and Microsoft are good examples. Investing in these companies can be very expensive, but you can be assured the company won’t go bankrupt (and have ther share values drop to zero) over night.
So which ones should you go for? It all depends on what your goals are. Large caps tend to do better than small caps, but remember that even a company like Microsoft was once a small cap and therefore small caps have a lot greater growth potential.
An easy way to think of this is to compare stocks with trees. Think of a small cap stock as an oak tree that is a year old, and think of a large cap stock as a giant redwood that is over 200 years old. In a storm (ie turmoil in the stock market as we tend to see every few years), the oak tree is going to have rough time and may even die, while the redwood will be very sturdy and highly unlikely to suffer much damage after the storm is over. However, the oak tree still has a lot of potential for future growth whereas the giant redwood may not grow very much more over its lifetime.
Even though market capitalization is an important consideration, it shouldn’t be the only way to decide. It’s just one measure of value. If you are going to become a serious investor, you will need to look at numerous other factors to determine if a company’s shares are worth investing in.