Is now the time to buy stocks/shares??

Bootsyjam_2

My advice would be to go for solid, dividend earning shares that you can understand.
As in, what does everyone need, no matter what? Energy and water. Cigarettes (sad but true). Alcohol (sad but true).
Go to digitallook.com, click on the FTSE, click on Constitunts, then click on % dividend, it will order everything for you.
As a punt, look at Gold price charts. Look at silver price charts. Then look at the major gold./silver mining companies. One set is lagging the other, so might that be worth investigating...

As for the market turmoil, just wait. August is a month when the big fund managers are away on holiday and juniors are manning the desks (although the big boys might have come back now!).
The first week in September tends to be an interesting time.

One piece of investing advice i was given is priceless-don't invest in ANYTHING that you don't understand. Water companies, power companies-makes sense doesn't it.

Do you really understand what these funds of funds are investing in and why?
Is there any way that you can track what they're doing/how they're doing?
Would you like to understabd what they're doing if you have over 250K of your money?
What incentives is your adviser getting for recommending these funds (clue-he probably won't tell you).

Aegis

Bootsyjam wrote: »

What incentives is your adviser getting for recommending these funds (clue-he probably won't tell you).

If he doesn't then he's breaking the regulations. Commission disclosure has been a requirement for quite a long time now.

gadgetmind

sabretoothtigger wrote: »

Better or worse then iii ? I much prefer MSE type layout

Probably on a par with iii regards forum (lack of) features, but with the advantage that the posters on TMF are far more polite and massively better informed regards general investing. However, specific share chitchat tends to have higher volumes in iii.

cinderfella

gadgetmind wrote: »

Probably on a par with iii regards forum (lack of) features, but with the advantage that the posters on TMF are far more polite and massively better informed regards general investing. However, specific share chitchat tends to have higher volumes in iii.

Some of the guys on internet forums would have you believe that they can predict the precise time when doomsday will arrive.
They will bankrupt you very easily if you don't DYOR.
---fools & their money---

gadgetmind

cinderfella wrote: »

Some of the guys on internet forums would have you believe that they can predict the precise time when doomsday will arrive.
They will bankrupt you very easily if you don't DYOR.
---fools & their money---

Quite right.

One of the major defining attributes of intelligent people is that they know what they know and they know what they don't know. Such insight brings a certain humility, a certain realisation that we can't foresee the future and so just have to adopt a position that maximises our chances given all the likely futures while minimising our exposure to the unlikely ones.

sabretoothtigger

Donald_Rumsfeld wrote:

Reports that say that something hasn't happened are always interesting to me, because as we know, there are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns - the ones we don't know we don't know

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/3254852.stm

Sceptic001

sabretoothtigger wrote: »

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/3254852.stm

The irony is that Rumsfeld's much-ridiculed remark, while maybe not very elegantly expressed, is absolutely correct.

sabretoothtigger

He is paraphrasing Socrates apparently