Investment tips for 15 yr old with $800?
Answer:
You could invest in stocks. Its a very interesting thing and you can make a lot of money. Say you buy 80 stocks of a company for $10 each. If they go up by 3 dollars you already make $240 easily. That evolves from there so u can buy more stocks then sell them for more money. After a while you will be sitting on a decent amount of money. Of course it could all backfire so pick a good company.
Put in in a CD at the bank and make sure you can't take it out for 10 years. Seriously, you'll be happy when it's grown and you have that money in your mid-twenties.
Legally, I'm not sure how much investing you can do on your own other than bank stuff. I think that you will need to enlist someone over 18 to open an online trading account if that is where you are headed. As for turning $800 into $20k to $80k in 4 years - not likely. You can generally count on 10% to 20% in the current market with prudent investing. Get more speculative and the rewards can be higher. So can the risks. You can improve the odds by spending a lot of time studying the market and using some of the techniques that various "Here's How I Made My Millions" pitchmen promote. Basically, though, you will likely need to do daytrading and I doubt that you have the time or resources to get involved in that. Good luck in whatever you decide.
Look for an S & P index fund with no loads and no minimum or low minimum investment. Charles Schwab has a decent selection. I only know them because my sister-in-law helps me trade with them. With an index fund, you don't have to worry about what the "market" thinks about a single company's earnings, you can just watch the evening news and generally be happy when the market's up, and annoyed when it's down. Just keep funneling money into the account, unless it really warps downward over time, which means it's being poorly managed. What do I mean about what the "market" thinks about a company? I'll tell you. A few years ago I bought Microsoft when it was down quite a bit. Over the next 3 years, Microsoft made over 1 billion dollars in profit more than it made in each previous year. Well apparently the "market" didn't think that was good enough, because the stock just plodded along. That was also the time when all the states and the European countries were suing Microsoft for...uh...giving out Explorer for free...and...umm...well apparently because they thought they could just bleed Microsoft for cash rather than buy another operating system that would suit their needs better, perhaps one for which new software comes out a year or so later than it does for Windows. Jackasses. Anyway even a split didn't do very much for it. Needless to say, I'm annoyed about that. That's why I like Index funds, at least for now. Good luck.
You're a bit too optimistic about your hopes of returns.
There are billionaire investing professionals who can do whatever they want with money, get tax breaks, know all of the tricks (legal and illegal), can invest in all types of assets (stocks, real estate, art, currency, futures, precious metals, commodities, ANYTHING. Plus they can short a stock, hedge, borrow, etc), and they still can RARELY beat the stock indexes consistently, even though there is no limit to what tricks they can do.
I think that the best you can hope for is a CD. There are very good mutual funds out there, such as FAIRX, which seems to make money even in a bear market, but you need at least 2500 dollars for most funds, plus they have fees of like 40 dollars or so just to buy into the shares. 40 dollars out of 800 is already setting you back 5% without doing anything.
Get your parents to put it in a mutual fund or some other spider. It's a small amount of money, but you should be able to find a spot for it. 5-10% returns a month is a bit silly to assume. You're looking at more like 5-10% a year (and being happy with it).
Bonds, while slow, are not a waste of time. They are lower than you can get with some good stock picks (or a good mutual fund that makes good picks), but they are also above the rate of inflation. Why would anyone buy them if they were below the inflation rate?
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