What kind of stock should I go into this year?

[Justin Lanton]

Hello, I would like to have some ideas on some good and pretty safe stocks. I know stocks in general are a gamble but, I just want to have some ideas on some pretty reasonable shares for my portfolio. Any ideas for me??

[C o n f u c i a n]

http://www.google.com/finance?q=pcx

[Dave W]

My personal opinion is that if you have less than $50,000 to invest, it's better to put it into a no-load mutual fund that tracks one of the major indices (e.g. S&P 500, Russell 2000, etc.) rather than buying individual stocks. With an individual stock, there's always the risk that something could happen to make the value of the shares drop dramatically even if the market is doing OK. To prevent that from destroying the whole portfolio, I like to have at least 10 different stocks from different industries in my portfolio and to keep commission costs very low as a percentage of investment, I prefer to buy a minimum of $5,000 worth of each stock.

It's very hard to know which stocks will do well. Many people make predictions and some are right and some are wrong. Some people have a higher percentage of being right, but no one is right all the time.

If you want to see some of the stocks I think look underpriced or overpriced at any given time, I just recently started posting some of my thoughts on Twitter ( https://twitter.com/#!/DewPoint52 ). Keep in mind that anything I say there is not a recommendation for you to buy or sell any particular stock, but simply my current thinking that you might or might not find helpful.