[ale] [OT based on] Open-Source program(s) for Stock Trading ?

[Ed Cashin]

On Mon, Jun 8, 2009 at 9:23 AM, Marc Ferguson<marcferguson at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hey Folks,
>
> Courtney mentioned stock software and that triggered a question I've been
> meaning to ask.  Since you guys are like my "advisers" besides Linux I'll
> ask you all.
>
> I would like to get into the stock market, but I don't really know how to
> start.  My only inclination of the market are http://www.simustock.com/ and
> http://www.google.com/finance.  Unfortunately; I don't really know how to
> read the market that well. It's just a bunch of numbers to me, at this
> point. I've chosen the typical companies (AAPL, GOOG, MA, MSFT, NTDOF, RHT,
> etc) to put in my portofilio, but what to do with the news and blah blah
> blah. Thanks.

I do think that for most people it's important to understand as much
as possible about markets and economics, including some financial
news, but it's [again, for most people] a mistake to try to make trading
decisions based on news.

There are a lot of books out there about short and intermediate term
trading.  If you really want to try to make money based on news, I'd
say try to read as many of them as you can and then find a place where
you can "paper trade" online to test out your ideas without losing all
your money in real life.  Investing a year or two in educating yourself
is probably less painful than financial disaster.

If you decide against trying to profit from day-to-day developments
(as I did eventually)
you might consider using ETFs with a wide basis as described in my
Buy-Only Rebalancing article mentioned earlier.  (In fact, it mentions
ways to leverage personal insights, but those are based more on
expertise and observations rather than stuff like chart patterns or
trading the news.)

-- 
  Ed Cashin <ecashin at noserose.net>