Expert: Paul Henneman - 4/29/2004

Question
Howdy Paul,
I salute you for doing this service.  That is awesome.  I have a quick question for you.  I would like to put up a super basic INVESTING101 on my website.  www.LearnFromDave.org .   Please check it out and drop me a line if you have any advice on what I could to to make it more useful.
Thank you very much.
Have a great day

David Craige

Answer
Thank you David for the inquiry! I checked out your site and think that you are providing an excellent service. My initial thoughts:
Being an expert on this website has taught me one very important thing: There are ALOT of people out there who realize the advantage that investing can give to them, but have no clue how to go about it. I'm sure you know this, which is why you are creating your site.
Some suggestions for content:
www.FOLIOfn.com is an EXCELLENT online brokerage service. They will trade an entire portfolio for only $20 per month flat fee. They can do this by massing up all requested trades, then executing twice a day, at 11am and 2pm. Anyone trading less frequently than once a month cannot do any better. Trading costs are virtually eliminated and even investments of a few thousand dollars are realistic. Most importantly, the investor can adjust their portfolio as much as they want without fear of increasing costs (up to 200 buy/sells a month for each portfolio). My company, www.ValuEngine.com recommends them to our users just because it is such a good way to implement our research. I can put you in contact with some of the senior people over there if interested.
I have some suggestions to add to the list of 'things you have learned': Patience, knowledge and discipline.  Common mistakes are that investors try to do too much, and can't keep to their budget so give up. This is the patience and discipline part, small investments monthly over many years does great things. Knowledge: Investors should start with safe investments, perhaps money market accounts while they learn and read all they can. I like to recommend "Investing for Dummies", a great introduction to all of the basic investment types. Users can get a general idea of what type of investor they feel themselves to be, then do further research. After a few months of this learning process, some safer investments could be mutual funds, bonds. Only after a few years should investors work directly with stocks. But this should be the goal as a stock portfolio can return so much higher if done properly.
Some other general ideas:
Perhaps a glossary of recommended websites to visit to learn more about investing or to find research sites. I would volunteer my company's website, www.ValuEngine.com to be there if this is of interest. Most websites actually pay commissions for referrals, so while I think you should stick to your guns and pick the sites you think are best, you can often work out a commission referral fee for the link.
Also a list of free financial portals. Every potential investor should practice first by doing the research, then setting up practice portfolios to see how they do before actually investing. This can be done with stocks and mutual funds for free on sites such as finance.yahoo.com

A list of suggested reading would also be ideal for beginner investors, they frequently do not know where to turn. "Investing for Dummies" is one I like very much. You can actually set up a 'Merchant Account' with Amazon.com and link directly to them so users can buy the books right off your website. Amazon pays you a commission for each sale. Another GREAT resource is "Barron's Dictionary of Finance and Investment Terms". Every beginner investor will constantly run across vocabulary they do not understand. This covers it all.
If you would like to sell research reports on your website for virtually every publicly traded company, ValuEngine has a 'financial library' avaialbe at www.VEReports.com  We can easily provide a link that is tracked, and you could have a ticker box on your site to actually offer financial research content.
I also strongly recommend that you consider a monthly or bi-monthly email to all interested users on beginner investing topics. Have guest writers submit content, collect user emails who are interested in receiving this on your website, and send it out. It could be great content, you could also post the articles on your site, and when your user base is strong enough actually get some advertising revenue. I'd be happy to put you in touch with companies that will pay to sponsor such user emails if interested.

Best of luck. Let me know if I can assist in any way, my direct email is paul@valuengine.com

Sincerely,
Paul Henneman
President
ValuEngine, Inc.
www.ValuEngine.com
www.VEReports.com
www.VEInstitutional.com