Political Crossfire Forums

5% dividend is huge in today's markets. Most stocks operate on raw growth and reinvestment. BP's probably different because it's a state owned enterprise which funds a public pension.

Anyway, you should explain the math to unsavvy financiers here. People here don't necessarily know how the premiums are calculated on options. They're not likely familiar with stock trading at all in the first place.

You should also provide those nifty graphs too I remember learning about in my Money and Capital Markets courses.

Here's my strategy.. It's radical, and earth shattering... But here it is:

Buy low and sell high..

This does not make sense. If you buy in at BP at say 42 and it plunges to 20, and you wrote a bunch of puts on 40, the other guy is obviously going to exercise it and now you are buying in at 40 when the market is 20. You get f**k.

That said I'm bullish on F and SCHW

I don't know about Ford... I've been hearing for about 4 years people being 'bullish' about F.. But it's still flopping around. It did hit $18 or so a couple years back..So if you bought it at $2 or so yuo would have done alright.. But for the most part it's been disappointing...

Car stocks are a tough call.

Dont you have to put in a minimum of at least $100K on options? I dont like them, especially if it goes one way in the other direction and you get a margin call- far riskier than just owning stocks.

I go with Bill's idea: buy low, sell high- I look for bluechip companies with good profits and p/e ratios. I almost doubled my money on Baidu shares last year and am currently out of the market (I think its gonna tank any time now so Ive cashed out) with the exception of my S&P 500 index fund.

This reminds me that i don't know anything about this stuff.