#52 I don't watch either of those.

Depends on whether you mean "steal" through legitimate market activity - i.e. having a better stock valuation model - or "steal" as in outright fraud/theft.

The latter, I can't help you with.

For the former, comp sci alone won't cut it. You will probably want a Ph.D. in theoretical physics and/or statistical modeling.

who gives a shit

About bitcoin - #47 explained the problems succinctly. "Stay away" is great advice right now since you'd most likely be buying near the top of a speculative bubble.

#48 Nnnnno, it's the exact opposite of a fiat currency, in that there is a fixed supply not controllable by a government and it's behaving exactly like a commodity.

#45 I realize it's a joke, but I'm pretty sure gold is in a spec bubble phase at the moment, too.

#46 Past behavior is not indicative of future results. The reason I claim sub-junk for crates is that nobody knows what will happen to TF2 in two years. It's much less predictable than stocks and bonds.

#43 I am not the 1%, but with a job in the oil industry I am doing well.

Sub-junk.

#34 Does that book explain the carry trade? We devoted probably 2 classes to discussing how major financial institutions seem to be making abnormal profits on that.

Yeah, that's what Excel is for.

#28 I've never done a serious valuation so I don't have an informed opinion. My instinct says fundamentals are far less volatile than stock price. Most businesses' investor relations strategy is to get the market to more accurately reflect what they view as the "true" value of the firm, making the stock price swings less volatile. But again, my investment strategy is to just dump money in broadly diversified funds, so my opinion on that kind of analysis doesn't even matter to my own investments.

And thanks, it'll be a huge load off my back to finish school!

#27 Yep, we did several currency hedging exercises in my international finance class. You can make all kinds of incredibly complicated instruments using combinations of the contracts I mentioned. If you want to give yourself room to make some money on the upside while limiting the downside risk of a future cash flow, you can do that. If you want to totally invert the curve on whether you're making money or losing it at any given exchange rate, you can do that too.

I do. I'm not currently authorized to use them on my Schwab account and have no real desire to play with them.

Futures can be used two ways - gambling or hedging. There's a big difference. Hedging is a 100% legit means of reducing risk exposure for a price. If you, for example, want to make sure that in one year you can get gasoline for a certain price, you can make a forward contract with a supplier. It will cost you some amount of money now if you want that price to be significantly lower than (or even the same as ) the current price. If you want to make it significantly higher, the fee will be minimal, but then you've entered into an agreement to purchase it for a high price in a year.

Of course, you can use combinations of forward contracts, buying, selling and short-selling to do almost anything from locking in prices to gambling on other people's housing debt.

There aren't many investments that would have done better. Salary/wages would be unaffected if you kept your job, which is great, but if you owned a small business you'd probably be facing the same demand slump that ate into the stock market, damaging your business's balance sheet.

#21 If you kept your stocks from 2008 they'd be roughly recovered in value by now, I believe.

But yes, this is just what to do with a bit of extra money. Dope-wolf's point about investing in yourself is a great one. Best way to do that is usually to get more education.

Nero, no matter what you do, you're investing. If you choose to hold cash, then you are investing in 100% cash. If you choose to spend all that cash on twinkies and stash the twinkies in a mattress, then you're investing in twinkies.

Investing in 100% cash is a terrible idea because cash loses value over time! Inflation will eat away at anything you save. If you want your money to be worth more in the long run, just sink your savings in something like the S&P 500 index, or open a Vanguard account and pick a few large-cap/value funds.

#17 I'm not immediately seeing any good options for reading other than textbooks. If you want textbooks, let me know and I'll go see what looks good.

There is a hell of a lot to cover with regards to finance. If you really want to know how to do individual stock valuation, you'll need to take a couple of full classes: one on financial accounting (which covers how businesses report their profits/activities to Wall Street through the balance sheet, income statement and other disclosures) and one on actual stock valuation using models like Black-Scholes.

The theory behind "semi-strong market efficiency" is that stock market valuations reflect all current public and semi-public information pertaining to a stock. The actual value of a company can thus be measured by its market cap - the share price times the number of outstanding shares. The market cap is essentially a perpetuity that describes the present value of all future earnings by that company. When new information comes to light, the price of the stock changes, reflecting the most up-to-date assessment of the company's future earnings.

With that sort of theory, the only way to pick a stock that guarantees it will outperform the market is by having true insider information. For instance, if you knew that Exxon was about to acquire three huge new oil fields on the cheap, and nobody else knew it yet, you could buy Exxon stock that day and make a huge amount of money when the information became known.

Almost nobody agrees on that theory, though. Some savvy investors think that even with all information available to the market at large, stocks can still be under- and over-valued in day to day trading, leaving opportunities for them to make money.

Edit: I was slightly wrong, market cap reflects all future earnings AVAILABLE TO EQUITY HOLDERS.

Ultimately, to get to the point where you can invest money, you need to be making more than you spend. Sounds simple enough. Just make sure that when you get a job, you make yourself a budget and balance it against your income. Try to keep expenses lower than income and voila, you're saving some money.

#11 Typical investing scenarios are "Hey I had nothing in my 401(k) account 5 years ago, but I maxed out my contribution every year and now it's at $110,000."

To parse this - the maximum yearly contribution to a 401(k) retirement account is currently $17,000 per year. That means you are investing $17 grand of your own money for 5 years in stocks for a total of $85,000. The extra $25,000 came from the stock investment growing.

The purpose of a 401(k) account is to hopefully never touch it until you're retired. Keep putting money in your retirement account early and make sure the investment portfolio is very broadly diversified, and over the course of 30 years you should be able to retire pretty nicely.

You can invest with almost any amount of money. Just be aware that 10% of $20.00 is $2.00, so even if you're making 10% a year on your investments, it ain't gonna amount to much.