Is anyone besides me jump on the Country Wide Finance (CFC) stock? What do you guys cogitate?
stocks, itc.Answers: In investing circles, predicting the bottom on a stock like Countrywide is call "trying to catch a falling gouge."
No one really knows how discouraging things are or how much worse they can get. You may look resembling a genius contained by a year. Or, you could be trying to dump the shares of a bankrupt company at a huge loss.
My personal philosophy is to never buy shares contained by a company that has serious financial issues until I see clear signs of a recouping. I haven't seen anything that suggests that Countrywide is set for a turnaround. In addition to getting long-gone their subprime problems, they need a reclamation in the housing souk to generate new revenue. I'm not betting on that arranged on 2008.
Good luck!
Addendum: I just observe that CFC has soared surrounded by the last few hours on speculation that it is going to be bought out by Bank of America. If they're selling, it may indicate that they perceive that they couldn't make it on their own. Unfortunately, it also vehicle that we missed some very speedy money! I still wouldn't have bought the stock because you can't count on another company making a purchase bestow and bailing out investors.
Where do I find stock charts showing total return? i.e growth of $10K?
Quicken.com used to show the gain of $10K including dividends, then I have to change to MSN nouns. Now they seem to hold dropped that feature. I can't find this exceedingly useful part on any stock charts anymore. It's still available for mutual funds at Morningstar I believe but not for stocks. Can anybody help me?Answers: None that I know of.
I would insist on you to do it manually.
What is CD laddering?
Answers: When you have a fixed income investment like a bond or a CD, you have to worry about interest rates. You don't want to be in a position and put all your eggs in one basket and when the CD matures, you are now faced with unfavorable interest rates -- i.e. your CD that just matured was paying 8% interest and now interest rates are 3%. In investments, this problem is called reinvestment risk -- the risk of unfavorable returns when you have to reinvest your money.
Laddering is a way to minimize reinvestment risk by spreading your CD's over different time periods so that only a portion of your investment is subject to reinvestment risk when it matures. For example, you want to allocate your investments over 5 years -- therefore, you would have 20% of your investments into CD's with 1 year maturity, 20% with 2 year maturity, 20% with 3 year maturity, 20% with 4 year maturity, and 20% with 5 year maturity. Therefore, 1 year from now when your 1 year CD matures, you reinvest that money in a new 5 year CD so your funds are evenly distributed with a CD maturing each year waiting to be reinvested. In the event you face unfavorable interest rates, only 20% of your portfolio is affected. Generally, you won't face unfavorable interest rates for 5 years in a row. It doesn't have to be one year increments, but you do want to keep the maturities evenly spaced out to minimize reinvestment risk.
As you notice, because of the consecutive maturities, it looks like a ladder with one maturity on top of another and hence the term "laddering."
Laddering is a term for taking your total investment and dividing it out into smaller chucks (or steps, rungs) and spacing out over different periods of time to get better rates of interest as your return. It is a great way to keep your money working on a continious basis but you might consider other avenues to increase your return such as mutual funds which may provide higher interest rates over longer periods of time.