Wednesday, April 13, 2005

Time to start job hunting

Later tonight I will start my job hunting and if you have any tips please share them! I know a lot of people out there have gone through the process of graduating college and entering the "real world". It should be an exciting time and very odd. I've always been used to going to classes, have summer vacation, and studying for tests. All that is over with (well almost, 6 more weeks).
From time to time I will post about the job process.

Tough day in the market. I added some NCC and KRB to my holdings. I might sell EBF soon because I originally bought it as a short-term play, but the market has been in a downtrend.

A point on commissions: I think you should always be aware of how much your commissions are in terms of percentage. I try to keep commissions always under 1% of my investment (I include the buy commission and the future sell commission). I've seen a good amount of investors who will be 25-30 shares or so and let's say the total investment is $700. Assuming $10 transaction costs the total costs will be $20. This commission is about 2.85% of the total investment- this is huge!
How to avoid this? I don't have too much money right now, so I focus on stocks that are under $35. I also want to be able to buy at least 75 shares. This, of course, depends on the stock price. If the price is low, then I'll buy 150-200 shares. For most of my transactions I try to buy 100 shares and my commission costs usually come out to be around 0.8%. I would want something lower, but this is the best I can do right now.
So keep those commission costs in mind! Also, check out discount brokers to save money on commission costs. From my last job, I've run into people who had around $2,000 in their accounts and would be paying transaction fees close to $20 per transaction (and quarterly fees).

No comments: