If you want to be stock market player you need to learn some fundamentals. There are different types of stock market players. You could be a day trader and jump in and out of stocks every day trying to pick up enough small gains on big share holdings. I think of this like betting huge amounts on the favorite in a horse race to show or come in third. This is gambling to me. We would call these types of players "jumpers” because if they lost a huge bet they might just jump out the window of a tall building. Most day traders get broke in short order. Leave that to the professionals who don't do so well at it either.

There are the speculative traders who will hold a stock for short time periods of a few days to a few months. If done properly this can be the best type of trader to be. Then there are the buy and hold investors. Warren Buffet was the most successful buy and hold investor in history. He was and still is a "buy and die” investor. In the past when commission fees were sky high and it was costly to trade stocks in this manner this was an excellent strategy. Now the fees are very reasonable so the strategy has changed to be more speculative.

These types of traders can be broken down farther into two main groups, the te

chnicians and the fundamentalists. A pure technician will rely on his charts exclusively and look for patterns over history and use the patterns of many stocks to form his strategy. The pure fundamentalist is going to rely on the income statement, balance sheet and other financial documents of a company to decide if the business is strong enough for him to put his money into its shares. Most traders use a hybrid of both types, the technician and the fundamentalist. I am a hybrid type of trader and look at the macro view of the economy as well. I like to look into the future of the economy about six months ahead of the present day as much as the past data that was recently released.

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