| No more classes, no more books, no more teacher's dirty looks. School's out. Out of school means out of mind, and the mind in question is usually mine. My daytime privacy has been invaded by a living, breathing, eating, preteen maniac.
Cora is allowed her vacation time. I can relate to a week off from work. After this first week of flopping around, we get back to the work of learning. It takes discipline, and Cora teaches me more about this subject every day.
One of the lessons in our private "2001 Summer School" is to learn how to read between the lines. This lesson can be as simple as understanding the story between "Once Upon A Time" to "The End." Sometimes, it can be as difficult as comprehending both sides of an issue on the evening news. The goal of this lesson is to learn how to tell the difference between fairy tales and reality, so we can protect ourselves from fraud.
Teaching Cora this lesson of reading between lines is made a bit easier by understanding the profession of writing. Writers have certain guidelines to follow in relaying a story to the public. A columnist follows different guidelines than a journalist or a novelist, but - in the long run - the goal is to tell a story for a specific purpose.
A writer often has limited time and space in their format. This might mean that certain elements of their story could fall through the cracks. This material can be very important in hindsight. At press time, these details can be overlooked or rated as insignificant. Another reason for lack of detail in a story is because of the "angle" or "slant" in which the story is written. If a story has too much to tell, the time and space format can limit the telling to only one part of the whole.
All this cutting and cropping and editing of a story applies to the stock market as well. When you read an annual report, or when you cruise through an online resource, you are reading material that is produced by a writer. Companies hire writers to report their news. The writer receives information from the company, and is obliged to give the best story based on this knowledge.
Fortunately, financial institutions have rules they must follow in reporting their news to the public. Figures must be correct. Actions of publicly traded companies must be filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission's Electronic Data Gathering And Retrieval ( SEC EDGAR) system. All of these guidelines are in place to help prevent the company from giving the writer fraudulent facts. It also prevents the writer from spinning fairy tales out of reality.
If we lived in a perfect world, this plan would be all we would need to protect us from financial fraud. In order to make our world a bit safer for ourselves, we need to do more than just look and listen. We can be pro-active in our own research. We can learn to read between the lines of all the fine print and the verbal spiels on television. This can be accomplished by adopting the journalist's guidelines of the five "Ws" and an "H":
Who: The first thing you want to know is who YOU are. What is your risk tolerance financially? If you are working the "buy and hold" strategy, you want to hold your investments for more than a year for tax purposes and for maximum potential profits. Can you go without this money for a year or more? If not, can you bear the possible losses?
What: Do you know what your objectives are for investing? Is it for your child's education? A new home? A vacation? What are your expectations? What will you do if your goals can't be reached because of unseen circumstances?
When: The time is now. Once you've answered all the questions here don't delay in your investments. We all know how quickly time can fly. Take time to read Why Buy Today? at BUYandHOLD, take a deep breath, and proceed to secure your financial future.
Where: Find out everything you can about the company you want to invest in. This includes a history of the company, who is on the board, the people involved in the upper echelon of the company, and what they did previous to this job. What is the product or service? Are their customers happy? What are future plans and goals?
Why: You can change your life with investing. You can teach yourself and your children that you do matter in the larger scheme of things. You can profit from learning and from supporting the products and services you believe in.
How: You can take your investment strategy into your own hands. BUYandHOLD is available to you 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. You can research and place orders and manage your account any time you want (BUYandHOLD routes orders to the market place three times a day.) When you take an active interest in your investments, you know exactly when and where your money is going.
Even with all this information under our belts, there are times when everything we know just isn't enough. Fraud happens. Mistakes are made. Unfortunate and unforeseen circumstances take place that are beyond our control. As mothers, we know that we don't live in a fairy tale. But, if we take time to responsibly create our own stories, we've done all we can do to protect ourselves.
Speaking of stories - next week, Cora and I go on the road to visit with my parents (who are totally without a clue regarding online finances). There should be some interesting tales coming your way...
Until next week,
Linda Goin |
