Do you like to invest your money? What do you typically invest in? Stocks? Bonds? Real estate? Precious metals? Do you think you’re a long-term investor or a short-term investor? Let’s explore the various types of investing and decide whether you are attempting to make short-term gains or whether you’re truly looking to prosper in the distant future from your investments today.

Long Term Investments

Many of you work in corporate jobs that offer 401(k) plans. Some of your companies even offer a match up to a certain perfect of what you put into your retirement fund. If you are contributing some of your earnings into a 401(k) account, this is most definitely a long-term investment. Your money is put into this account with the expectation that it won’t come out before you reach the age of 59 ½ years of age. If you do, then you will be penalized a percentage of your fund’s current value. If you are putting money into this account for a short term gain, please don’t because it won’t pay off for you.

Real estate is another great form of a long-term investment. Well, as long as you’re purchasing it as a rental that is. At this time, real estate can still be purchased for a reasonable rate. Let’s say a property is valued at $100,000 (just to keep things simple). The rent for this property will most likely be $1,000 per month, or $12,000 a year. So, even if you have the absolute perfect renter that pays every month and stays for an entire year, you’ll still only collect 12% of your investment for that year. But, as a long term thinker, you realize that not only are you gaining a return on your investment, but the equity in your rental home is also increasing. So, you could actually be earning 17% or more on your house instead of just 12%. If you earn that over the course of 30 years, you’ll have quite the chunk of change!

Short Term Investments

If you head to the bank, they have a few short term investment options available to you. For starters, you could invest your money into a simple checking account that pays interest (my credit union pays 3%). They also offer CDs that pay just a little more than 1%, but if you don’t plan on doing anything with your money for the next year anyway, then it might be a decent way to make a quick buck.

The stock market is a great place for people that like to make short term gains. In fact, spread betting is one of the most popular ways to earn money fast. If you believe that a stock price will move up or down from its current state, you could place a spread bet for more money than you’re actually putting down, and you don’t even have to buy the stock to do it! A great deal of money can be made in a short period of time, but of course a great deal could be lost as well. Invest wisely.

Trading on the Forex market is something most of us have never ever deemed as a means of making money. The field of professional finance typically seems extremely distant from the real world, and quite often it is, yet it’s actually much easier to get involved than you might think.

If you think of an investor, a traditional bank or prosperous businessperson likely comes to mind. The truth is, it can be you or me. Exchanging currency to make money doesn’t require a huge capital expense. While you will obviously make more money the more you have available to put in, a lot of brokers will permit you to begin with as little as $10. Many offer a demo forex account, so that you can trade with virtual cash to see how the whole thing works. You simply need a working computer and an account with an fx broker.

In their simplest terms, the currency market is all about buying and selling currency in order to make a nice gain. This revenue is created because the value of one currency versus another continually fluctuates. The idea is to speculate on whether or not the currency pair, e.g. GBP/USD, will improve or deteriorate. You ‘buy’ a currency whenever you expect it to increase, or ‘sell’ if you expect it to fall.

There are several influencing factors and complicated charts that can help you choose how to buy and sell, but one of the most effective ways of analyzing the direction of a currency is to utilize the news. When the news sounds like the market of one currency is suffering, then it’s fair to assume this will be mirrored in the value of the currency.

When you finally become secure predicting patterns in line with the news, you can consider all other varieties of signals, like those you can view in charts and simple analysis. Seasoned investors utilize a large number of sources to help them trade fx .

Foreign exchange trading like it is done at UK Forex brokers is accessible to everyone because, unlike the stock exchange, you are able to deposit a small amount of cash which allows you to hold a position of a higher value. A number of broker agents offer you leverage of 100:1 so that if you deposit $10, you’ll be able to reap the benefits of trading with $1000. Keep in mind though, that as the current market changes you can actually generate losses, and this could exceed your initial deposit.

Trading on the foreign exchange market may not be for every individual; there’s an inherent risk, but with experience and careful methods, earning profits is certainly feasible. There is a great deal of in-depth information available on the internet free of charge, so even learning doesn’t have to cost you anything at all. If it sounds like something you’d be interested in, maybe you should out a trial account? They cost nothing and you could really acquire a feel for the market. It’s not only a method of earning profits either; forex trading is exciting.

I’m sure you’ve heard the advice, “buy low and sell high”, but how many times have you actually been successful at this? To be an effective investor, you have to be willing to buy stocks when the market is going down and selling it while it’s still going up.

Face it, this is the way people usually invest in the stock market:  At the point we’re ready to invest in various shares of the market, we carefully watch our stocks of choice, just waiting for one of them to jump so we can quickly get in on the upward trend. So, when is it that we’re investing? Either when the stock is halfway to its peak or at the peak! Then, we might leave our investment in that stock for a while until we look at how it’s doing later in life. We then notice that all this time, the stock price has not gone up, it has actually gone down! We hate to take our investment out now, so we wait for a little while with hopes that it will soon skyrocket once again. But nope, the value continues to fall. Then, in fear that the stock is going to go bankrupt, we quickly pull out our investment to protect what we have left!

So, what have we done? We’ve bought high and sold low, which is exactly the opposite of what we’re supposed to do. While sometimes this is necessary (to cut our losses and move on), it’s certainly not going to make us rich in the future. In fact, it’s going to make us more broke than before!

If you are wise, you would research strategies online (from reputable sources of course) and put them into practice. Some individuals have chosen to learn market trading strategies at Alpari, which is also a wise move.

Many investors know that they should look at the up and down trends of the market, but few actually know what they should be looking for. Have you ever heard of the phrase, “double dip”? No, I’m not talking about double dipping a chip, but I suppose the visual is somewhat accurate.

When you take a look at historical trends in an individual share price of most any company, the stock price tends to start low (at any given point in time) and then it goes up to a peak (or high price in the market). Then, it inevitably falls again, to a low point almost where it first started. This is a double dip in the market (since it went down to its low point twice). This is when you should jump into the market. Obviously, this isn’t going to work 100% of the time, but the odds are now in your favor to make more of a profit on that particular stock.