Lemmons714 @lemmons714

Technical analysis is the study of past price and volume to understand how a stock has been behaving and where supply/demand has shown up. It is not a crystal ball, not a substitute for knowing the business, and not a system that guarantees what happens next. Price history shows tendencies, not certainties. Common mistake: treating a pattern or level as if it “must” play out a specific way. Charts describe what has happened; they do not dictate the future. Use it to frame context and risk, not as a prediction engine.

Orders of magnitude. Sir, I just learned what an ETF is on Tuesday.

Elon Musk @elonmusk

2 weeks ago

This will sound super crazy, but I see a path to SpaceX being worth orders of magnitude more than the current Earth economy

10K 10K 130K 11.4M 8K

True, an S&P 500 fund holds about 500 companies, but it is sized by market cap, so the biggest names take the biggest slice. You own the other 490. You just own less of them. A $4 stock and a $400 stock are a different question. Price is not the size. The size is price times shares.

Same basket can sit in either. The ETF trades all day, so the price you pay can drift from the value of the holdings. The mutual fund prices once, after the close, at the value of the holdings. The other split is taxes: the ETF structure usually passes fewer gains to you along the way. The fee still matters more than the wrapper.

@Markets_On_Deck The useful comparison is the gap, not the fee alone. A 0.50% fund costs $50 a year on $10,000. A 0.03% index fund costs $3. Same basket, $47 less handed over. That gap compounds for as long as the money stays invested. The fee comes out whether the year is up or down.

@KeepMoneySimple The split is the job of the money. The 401(k) is the base, usually a broad fund, because that money has decades of work to do. Individual stocks are the extra, because one company can go to zero and the base cannot afford that. Age is not the divider. When the money is needed is.

Cheap only means something if you compare the price to the business: earnings, sales, cash. A low share price tells you the share count is large, or the company is small, or both. It does not tell you it is a bargain.

Company A: $4 a share, 2 billion shares. Market cap = $8 billion. Company B: $400 a share, 10 million shares. Market cap = $4 billion. A is the bigger company. B only has the higher sticker price.

A $4 stock can be a bigger company than a $400 stock. Share price is not the size of the company.

The choice is about when you need the money, not how old you are. A 30-year-old saving for a house in two years and a 30-year-old saving for retirement in 35 years should not treat the money the same. The first pile cannot afford one company going to zero. The second has decades to recover from a bad year. A broad ETF is the usual core because it removes that one-company risk and leaves market risk. A narrow ETF, one sector or one theme, is closer to a stock than people think.

A stock is a slice of one business. An ETF, an exchange-traded fund, is a slice of many, bought in a single share. One bad earnings report can cut a stock in half. In a broad ETF, that same report is one name in the basket. The part most people skip: an ETF has a second price. The trading price is what you pay on the exchange. The net asset value is what the holdings are worth. Big firms can swap the underlying stocks for ETF shares, which is why those two prices usually stay close. A single stock has no basket underneath it. The price is just what the next buyer will pay. People usually sort them by the job of the money, not by age alone. Money needed in a few years is a bad fit for one company, because one company can go to zero. A long horizon can hold a single stock, but that is a bet on one business. A broad ETF is the usual core because it removes that one-company risk and leaves market risk. A narrow ETF, one sector or one theme, is closer to a stock than people think. Not financial advice.