When you are young, saving for something that’s years away, like your post-retirement phase, may not seem too important. But, that is exactly when you should start saving. The longer your money stays invested, the more time it has to grow. And, one of the basic ways to give money a chance to grow over the long term is by investing in some form of financial stock.
A financial stock is basically a type of security that signifies ownership in a corporation and represents a claim on part of the corporation’s assets and earnings. It can also be called finance stock, or simply a stock. A share, on the other hand, refers to the stock certificate of the corporation. A holder of stock also called shareholder, is an owner of a company and has a claim to a part of the company’s assets and earnings.
Considering you’re familiar with the basic activities centering business finance, here are 5 key points you must keep in mind before choosing to invest in financial stocks.
- Investing in Financial Stocks Comes With Substantial Risks, Especially in the Short Term
There’s a lot of up-and-down movement involved with stock markets. You can easily gain, or even lose, as much in a single day on your investment as you would gain in an entire year if that money were in something more stable and secure like a savings account.
Secondly, you can have periods where there are far more down days than there are up days. Some studies on business finance have revealed that the latter part of 2008 has been such a period when the stock markets have dropped by about 40% that year.
Typically the growth rate in a stock market is about 7% per year, though it takes years to approach that average. Sometimes, it’ll be higher; sometimes, it’ll be lower. Hence, it must have been clear by now that investing in financial stocks is something that makes sense over a longer term, at least for a decade or so.
- Investing All Your Money in the Financial Stock of a Single Corporation Can Be Very Risky, But It Also has the Potential for Huge Returns
It’s true that you can make a lot of money by investing in the finance stock of a single corporation, but at the same time, there exist a ton of risks too. While stocks can sometimes skyrocket, companies may often completely fail as well which causes their stocks to become worthless. In fact, the entire industrial sector can fall into nothingness over time owing to this phenomenon.
Of course, you can invest in a big company to drastically reduce the chances of failure, but this can also sharply reduce the chances of your success too.
- Spreading out Your Assets across the Financial Stocks of Multiple Corporations is a Good Strategy for Reducing Risks, But It has Some Other Complications too
The most common strategy to reduce risk when investing in financial stocks is to invest in different companies at once. For it is less likely that all these companies will face failure at the same time. But this also reduces your ability to earn big returns, because the simultaneous rise of stocks in all of those companies is an unlikely event too. Hence, diversification of assets is the most important rule of thumb business finance.
The real drawback here is that if you invest in multiple stocks, you’ve to execute multiple “buy” orders with your brokerage. And the total fees you’ve to incur will knock your investment down from high to average pretty quickly.
- Investing in Financial Stocks is not the Only Option to Invest Your Money
Though the publicity made by the media focused on business finance has brought stock markets into the limelight, you must realize that investing in stocks is not the only way to invest your money; rather it’s merely one available option among many.
You can simply keep your money in a savings account, and earn a steady return with very low risk. You can invest in real estate, or bonds, or collectibles, or precious metals, or foreign currency as well. All of these things have some level of risk involved though, they offer a guaranteed return, and have varying degrees of liquidity. You can also invest in yourself, improving your future earnings potential. All these investments have been more stable but quiet, meaning they aren’t talked about nearly as much.
- A Mutual Fund is a Collection of Investments, Often Financial Stocks
In the realm of business finance, a mutual fund is nothing but a collection of investments. It can be a collection of various finance stocks, but can also include other things such as bonds, precious metals, foreign currency, real estate, and other investments.
Mutual fund companies may vary in terms of how they’re managed. While some funds are directly managed by teams of people, others are operated by minimal people either using very simple rules for buying and selling or by using computer algorithms.
Mutual funds often come with fees that are generally expressed as “expense ratio,” which shows how much of the value of the fund is burned up every year to employ the people running the fund.