Foreign Coins-British Coinage

Recently I discovered a friend of mine collected foreign stamps, while I prefer to collect coins. Once upon a time I had bought lots of foreign stamps, but had been trying to sell them for years at yard sales with no luck. As it turned out the friend had collected foreign coins that he no longer wanted. So we traded! Both of us ended up very happy with what we got.

Here are some of the unique coins now in my collection.

196h Century British Coins

19th Century British Coins

British coins are easy to identify.  The fun part was seeing the different monarchs on the heads sides of the coins. Also, I also wonder about the coins from 1939-1945 that survived World War II. I wonder whose hands they were in at that time.

18th Century British Coins

18th Century British Coins

When we traded coins I never expected to get coins from the 18th Century. These coins have certainly seen a lot of history having been around before the sinking of the Titanic and World War I.

I hope you enjoy these. Later I will post more coins from other countries.

Still learning about Stocks and Market

My learning journey through the land of buying stocks is progressing. I'm finding it is easier to acquire knowledge by "doing" as opposed to reading books. Yet, since cash is involved, that may prove an expensive way to learn.

Since I last posted I have purchased 5 different stocks. I have yet to sell any, as my idea is to go "long" on them and hold them all at least a year to minimize any taxes.

The stock I had the most hope for (rsol) is the only one that has sunk down a $1 a share since I bought it. Two of my stocks (asti and ve) are hovering up and down within about $.25 of what I bought them for. My fourth stock (dis), and I must add the priciest stock in my portfolio and the one I could only afford to buy 4 shares of, is doing the best.  My 5th stock (pets) I just bought today, so at this point it is hard to say what it will do.

I have discovered that the more money you have to invest the better your odds are because you can buy the high cost solid stocks that pay dividends.  This will prove tricky for me, because I can only afford to buy about $200 worth of stocks a month. I have thought of just saving up my money for a couple of months to buy the higher priced stocks, but they are the ones that go up and up and then cost more than when I originally started planning to buy them.

I must wait a year though, to learn if my stock choices are proving worth the investments.

More on Trading

After a month of researching information on complaints and exploring the websites of TradeKing, OptionsXpress, and Scottrade, I ended up settling for Scottrade and have execute my first trade orders as of this evening.

I did find it a very slow, and sometimes frustrating process, to sign up with Scottrade. The first issue was their website isn't too fond of Mozilla Firefox, so I had to drop into Internet Explore to finish the signing up on my account. I had to call the 800 number to figure out this is what the issue was. The good news was, I got a human right away, and one that spoke English, and was intelligent enough to figure out what was wrong in less than 5 minutes.

My second glitch with Scottrade was needing proof of my physical address. When you live in the sticks (being among the trees of the forest)  like I do, you don't receive mail to your house.  Like everyone else in my small town, we all have PO Boxes for mail. Well, due to the Patriot Act you must prove your physical address. That took a bit of time and scanning, especially when someone at Scottrade neglected to tell me the proof need to be less than three months old.

All said and done, I'm on Scottrade now. The real plus is every time I've had to call, I get someone really nice on the phone who is skilled at resolving frustration or calming ruffled feathers. At this point, my experience has been they have great customer service and you don't have to sit through a computerized system to reach a human being, even when it is after 8 p.m. at night.

Now, perhaps, I can settle back into some novel writing.

On-line trading: OptionsXpress, TradeKing, and Scottrade

My journey through the land of learning about on-line trade and stocks is continuing.  I must admit, at this time, I'm not getting much writing accomplished.  I am expanding my brain cells though.

What I've learned so far is that I really like the Virtual Trading on OptionsXpress and it is teaching me a lot. I was pretty much ready to commit to them as my on-line broker, when I started mentioning to people they are a branch of Charles Schwab. That led to a rant from my mother of how they cost her money many years ago in a land branch. Another friend then confirmed their reputation. I went on-line, and what one finds is enough to scare one completely off of trading.  Of course, all the on-line companies had lots of customer complaints.

So, then I started digging into TradeKing further. I really don't like the way their website looks. I wasn't really able to check out anything without completely signing up for an account. Even then I was locked out of many places since I hadn't deposited any funds yet. Then I found out they charge a $50 fee if you don't do anything with the account in a year. Since my plan is to buy stocks and sit on them until retirement (or they go way up and it would be crazy not to sell), I don't see myself necessarily buying or selling stocks every single year. They also had many complaints on-line. The most attractive fact about TradeKing was they only charge $4.99 a buy or sell.

Thus I started looking over Scottrade. I did have some trouble setting up the account, but even late a night I was able to get someone at the company on the phone that determined the issue was in the browser I was on and that changing browsers fixed the issue. The site looked more pleasing than TradeKing. I liked the fact that when I signed up they gave me an actual account number.  Neither of the others did so.

When I arrived home today, I had a phone message from an employee at Scottrade offering services if I needed any help or had any questions. Not only did she leave a phone number, but a first and last name. That made me feel valued, and that I would easily be able to get help if I needed it.

Scottrade charges a $7 a trade. The only real drawback I've found so far is you need to start with a deposit of $500. OptionsXpress and TradeKing don't have a minimum deposit to start.

That's my appraisal of three of the on-line trading websites. I didn't look at some of the others because they charge monthly or annual fees or require huge sums of money to begin with.  My plan is to buy $100-$200 of stock a month and slowly build up a portfolio.  After all, I'm in the working class, and that's all my budget can afford.

More on Exploring On-line Stock Buying

As I have free time, I am continuing to educated myself on stocks. After finishing two books, I decided to sign-up for an on-line broker and have a look around. After reading reviews, I decided on OptionsExpress, partly because it has a virtual trading.

I must say, you almost need to give blood to sign-up for an account. About the only thing I didn't have to give to get on to check around the site was my bank account number.

I did set up a virtual account and have been playing around with buying various stocks and checking out charts and trying to read company spreadsheets for the past week. With the help of Wikipedia I figured out the difference between an overweight and an underweight stock.

Now I am considering signing up on a second trading site just to compare the differences of the two.

So much to learn . . .