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Forex Trading

Green Energy Stocks Investing

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The end of fossil fuel resources is near. The way oil and other natural resources have been extracted from the earth in the last century; the world is in danger of facing global warming as well as depletion of these precious resources. Do you know China is the largest producer of coal? Coal production n China would peak somewhere around 2010-2020. Are you aware of the fact that the peak of the global oil production (all liquids, including unconventional oil) will peak in the next few years.

The global peak of uranium production lies somewhere around2025-2050. The global peak of natural gas production lies somewhere around 2025! You must be thinking what to do every available source of energy seems to be peaking in the near future?

But there are many safe and environmentally friendly methods to generate the energy required. Uptill now these methods had been ignored maybe because they were a bit expensive. They were expensive in the sense that these methods factor in the external costs that were previously being ignored. Do you know this fact that the US Department of Energy has estimated that there is enough available offshore wind energy of the coasts of US that can nearly cover the current US electricity capacity? So what will fill this void in energy production in the coming decades?

If every bulb in the US was replaced with an energy efficient fluorescent lamp, enough energy could be saved to shut down around 100 power plants. If all the care in US were hybrids by 2025 that would roughly reduce 80% of the US oil import.

So the solution is already there but it requires investments which are right now not forth coming. This will soon change as the global supply of oil starts to dwindle. The solution is already there and as the end of fossil fuel nears which is only a decade away, more and more alternative energy solutions will be used to generate cheap energy. Enough power could be generated for the entire US by covering only 9% of Nevada desert with parabolic trough systems. This is something like a plot of land 100 by 100 miles.

You might have seen only a glimpse of that last year in 2008 when crude oil prices jumped to around $150 per barrel. This is something that is bound to happen. The supplies of fossil fuel are finite and will be exhausted in the near future. When the oil price reached above $100, plans got rolling for massive investment in the alternative energy sector. With the oil price coming down, these plans have been shelved but will be rerolled again when the oil price again starts to sky rocket.

Oil deposits are being depleted at a fast pace and these resources once finished cannot be replenished. This prediction is based on our insatiable energy consumption and the lack of conventional supplies to meet the growing energy demand. This is most probably the safest long term bet that you can make in the long term. There is little doubt that companies operating in the green energy sector will ultimately become the major players in the overall energy generation and transportation mix of tomorrow.

Keeping in view the above facts, investing in green energy stocks in the best long term investment that you can make! Imagine Henry Ford in 1909 asking you to invest in his Ford Motor Company that is about to mass produce a horseless carriage.

He tells you that this invention could change the entire landscape of the country. Knowing everything that you know right now with the power of hind sight with you, you will definitely say yes. But many folks in that year of 1909 were skeptical about Model T success. This is now 2009, exactly a century has passed. Do you think investing in green energy stocks is a bad idea?

Mr. Ahmad Hassam has done Masters from Harvard University. Try these cash printing Forex Signals from heaven. Discover a revolutionary Forex Robot System! Visit the Uber Article Directory to get a totally unique version of this article for reprint.

Forex Trading

Index Options Investing (Part II)

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The duller the market, the lower the index options premium. Well it depends on the expectations of the traders whether the market will move sufficiently in the near future for them to exercise their buy or sell rights. The more volatile the market, the higher then index option premium!

Options are a far more basic instrument than the ETFs and futures. You can easily replicate any ETF or futures contract with an option but the reverse is not true. Options offer investors far more trading strategies as compared to futures. Such strategies can range from highly speculative to highly conservative. Suppose, you are afraid that the market is going to go down in the near future! You can protect yourself from this decline in the market by buying a out index option. When the market declines, the put increases in value. In case, the market does not decline, you only lose the premium that you had paid for the put option.

Of course for anyone who buys an options contract there should be someone to sell the options contract to make a complete transaction. Now the seller of a call options believes that the market will not move sufficiently up in the near future so he/she can make money by writing a call options contract and selling it to someone who believes the maker will move up.

The buyers of the put options are in a way insuring their portfolio against possible market decline but who are the sellers of the put options. They are primarily those investors who are willing to buy those stocks but only at lower prices. So in a way, buying and selling of options contracts make options trading a zero sum game. Either the market will move up or it will not. Either the option seller will win or the options buyer will win. The development of the stock index futures and the index options was a major development in 1980s for investors and money managers.

So in a way, buying and selling of options contracts make options trading a zero sum game. Either the market will move up or it will not. Either the option seller will win or the options buyer will win. The development of the stock index futures and the index options was a major development in 1980s for investors and money managers. The buyers of the put options are in a way insuring their portfolio against possible market decline but who are the sellers of the put options. They are primarily those investors who are willing to buy those stocks but only at lower prices. Options are an important component of any money manager portfolio. Many hedging strategies now depend on options.

ETFs give you the familiarity of the stocks but like index futures much higher liquidity and superior tax efficiency. The Exchange Traded Funds (ETFs) gave the investor still more ways to diversify across all market with very low costs.

Index options give the investors the ability to insure the value of their portfolios at the lowest possible prices and save on the transaction costs and taxes.

Mr. Ahmad Hassam is a Harvard University Graduate. Try these cash printing Forex Signals from heaven. Discover a revolutionary Forex Robot System! Grab a totally unique version of this article from the Uber Article Directory

Forex Trading

Stock Investing

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What would make a stock rise so much? The whole point of investing in stocks is to choose one that has the greatest chance of a rising share value. Don’t we all look for a stock that we could buy for $10 and later on sell for $300 per share? Well, how can we proceed to accomplish such a feat?

So if the company does well, its stock will go up in price and if the company does poorly its stock will go down in price. Buying a stock is essentially buying a small piece of the company and its future potential for growth and profits.

Many people think of markets as something devoid of emotions and feeling. Nothing is far from the truth. Markets are living breathing organisms that react violently to different events. The marketplace is in fact buyers and sellers, individuals and organizations that want to buy stocks or sell them. Now why does the stock goes up and down with the performance of the company. Actually the real force behind the stock rise and fall is the market place.

Any place where buying and selling takes place can be considered This buying and selling of stocks can only take place in exchanges like the New York Stock Exchange and over the counter markets like NASDAQ. If there are more buyers of the stock, its value will go up and if there are more sellers in the market, the stock price goes down.

Now it doesn’t mean that if the company does well and is showing good profits and earnings, its stock price will go up. Sometimes you will find that the company does well and is posting good quarterly earnings but still its stock price goes down. What’s the reason behind this?

Stock price goes up and down because of what the buyers and sellers expect will happen with the company in the near future. In reality the price of stock depends on the investor’s expectations. The price of a stock goes down because there are more sellers than buyers. So why is it so? The stock price does not go up or down just based on the company’s present performance.

In the short term, the behavior of the stock price is irrational and it can behave in crazy and illogical ways. However, the performance of the stock and the performance of the company over the long term have a logical relationship.

Focus on finding companies that are strong, well positioned in the right industries and have solid fundamentals like a good management, good product, good service, growing industry, rising sales, increasing profits and so on. The bottom line is don’t worry about the short term gyrations of the stock price. Sometimes the industry and the economy matters more than the company. Picking a stock doesn’t happen in a vacuum. Understanding the company’s industry and the overall economic environment is critical to stock picking process.

Mr. Ahmad Hassam has done Masters from Harvard University. Try these cash printing Forex Signals from heaven. Discover a revolutionary Forex Robot System! Grab a totally unique version of this article from the Uber Article Directory

Forex Trading

Growth Stocks

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When we talk of the capitalization of a company what do we mean by it? Capitalization or cap refers to the combined value of all the share of a company’s stocks. The division between large cap, mid cap and small cap are often blurry and not sharp. When you start looking for good stocks, you often come across these terms like large cap, mid cap, small cap, growth and value. Let’s discuss these terms for a moment.

Mid caps are companies with $1 to $5 Billion in capitalization and small caps are companies with $250 million to $1 Billion in capitalization. Anything below $250 million can be considered as micro cap. However the following divisions are generally accepted: Large caps are companies with over $5 Billion in capitalization.

You must have often heard of the P/E ratio of a stock being talked about the analyst on CNBC or Bloomberg. Perhaps the most important ratio is the Price to Earnings Ratio (P/E). Now the most important term that you come across is growth stocks and value stocks. How do you determine this is a growth stock or a value stock?

Let’s make this clear with an example. Do you know how to read the balance sheet of a company? One of the most important things in doing research on a stock is the balance sheet of the company. Suppose, company ABC stock is presently selling for $50. Now suppose that last year company ABC earned $5 for every share of the stock outstanding. This means stock ABC P/E ratio is 50/5=10. So the higher the P/E ratio, the more investors are willing to pay for the stock. So what is the P/E ratio? The P/E ratio divides the price of the stock by the earnings per share. Over the years, studies have shown that the P/E ratio is somehow related with the growth of a company. Now the higher the P/E ratio, the more growth the company is supposed to have. So it can be either the company is growing real fast of the investor have high hopes of its growth. Now these hopes can be realistic or foolish, you never know!

Growth companies are usually adolescent companies usually in sectors like computers, technology, telecom while value companies are mature companies usually in sectors like insurance, banking, manufacturing. Now, if you follow financial news than you must know that the large growth companies always grab the headlines. But do the growth stocks really make best investment? The lower the P/E ratio, the more value the company has. Low P/E ratio companies are not considered to be the movers and shakers in the market. Is there any statistical study that can guide us as to the performance of these different categories of stocks? Eugene Fama did seminal research on stocks and stock market s in’70s. Most of his results were startling and broke many myths. According to Fama and French, two famous researchers who did ground breaking research on stocks, over the last 77 years, large growth stocks have only seen 9.9% annualized rate of return as compared to 11.5% for the large value stocks.

The most probable cause seems to be their immense popularity. Since most of the headlines are captures by high growth companies, investors seem to think that they are the best investments. Now intuitively you might have thought that growth stocks are better. What can be the reason for their lower performance over the years?

Let’s go back to the IPO of Google. Think about Google, how its stock price shot up within a matter of weeks after it hit the market. Weeks after that it began to cool off. In 2007, Google stock was selling something around $500. So large growth stocks tend to get overpriced before you are able to buy them!

Mr. Ahmad Hassam is a Harvard University Graduate. Try these cash printing Forex Signals from heaven. Discover a revolutionary Forex Robot System! Get a totally unique version of this article from our article submission service

Forex Trading

Index Options (Part I)

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The options market has caught the fancy of many investors and this is not surprising. The beauty of options is embedded in its very name. You have the options but not the obligation to buy or sell stocks at a given price by a given time. Now for options buyers this option unlike futures limits their maximum liability to the option premium they had paid at the time of buying the options contract.

You must have come across the term Index Options. So what are index options? In’78, Chicago Board Options Exchange (CBOE) began options trading on popular stock indexes such as the S&P 500 Stock Index. The CBOE options trades in multiples of $100 per index point. This is much cheaper than the $250 multiple per index point for the S&P futures contract.

Let’s take an example. Suppose the S&P 500 Index is at 1100 points. You have a bullish opinion of the market and are of the opinion that the S&P 500 Index will go further up. An index option allows the investor to buy the stock index at a set point within the given time period.

So you decide to purchase a call option at 1150 for three months for 50 points. In other words you paid an option premium of $5000. Now what this means is that if any time for the next three months you decide to exercise your call option, you will get $100 for each point the index is above 1150.

So when an options contract loses value, you only lose the premium that you had paid while buying that contract. In that case you will only lose the premium of $5000 that you had paid to buy the call index option. Now, 1150 is the strike price of the index option. In case the S&P 500 Index does not rise above 1150, you can simply decide to not exercise your call option.

So for you to make a profit with this call option, the S&P 500 Index will have to rise above 1200 point within the next three months otherwise you will lose your premium. Contrast this with S&P futures. Call options are considered to be bullish.

A Put Index Option works in exactly the same way as a Call Index Option except that you make profit when the stock index goes down. If you had bought the put index options instead of the call index option in our example above, every point below the strike price of 1150 would have given you a profit of $100. In case the S&P Index had fallen to 1100 point, you would have recouped your options premium. Put options are considered to be bearish.

Options are highly dependent on the volatility of the market as well as time to expiry. As the options contract nears expiry, its premium starts decreasing. The more the options contract is away from expiry, the higher the premium you will have to pay. But the most important factor is the expected volatility of the market. Now the option premium that you pay is determined by the market and it depends on many factors like interest rates and dividend yield.

Mr. Ahmad Hassam is a Harvard University Graduate. Try these cash printing Forex Signals from heaven. Discover a revolutionary Forex Robot System! Get a totally unique version of this article from our article submission service