Value investing
"As an aside, why does it seem to be difficult to get a conclusive answer to this question? I'm going to start by trying to answer this question and I think the answer here will help answer the other questions.  Here is a incomplete list of the challenges involved: So my question is, is there any evidence that value investing actually beats the market? Yes there is a lot of evidence that it works and there is a lot of evidence that it does not.  timday's has a great link on this.  Some rules/methods work over some periods some work during others.  The most famous evidence for value investing probably comes from Fama and French who were very careful and clever in solving many of the above problems and had a large persistent data set, but their idea is very different from Damodaran's, for instance, and hard to implement though getting easier. Is the whole field a waste of time? Because of the above problems this is a hard question.  Some people like Warren Buffet have clearly made a lot of money doing this.  Though it is worth remembering a good amount of the money these famous investors make is off of fees for investing other peoples' money.  If you understand fundamental analysis well you can get a job making a lot of money doing it for a company investing other peoples' money.  The markets are very random that it is very hard for people to tell if you are good at it and since markets generally go up it is easy to claim you are making money for people, but clearly banks and hedge funds see significant value in good analysts so it is likely not entirely random. Especially if you are a good writer you can make a more money here than most other jobs. Is it worth it for the average investor saving for retirement?  Very, very hard to say.  Your time might be better spent on your day job if you have one. Remember because of the fees and added risk involved over say index investing more ""Trading is Hazardous to Your Wealth.""" "The June 2014 issue of Barclays Wealth's Compass magazine had a very nice succinct article on this topic: ""Value investing – does a rules-based approach work?"".  It examines the performance of value and growth styles of investment in the MSCI World and S&P500 arenas for a few decades back, and reveals a surprisingly complicated picture, depending on sector, region and time-period. Their summary is basically: A closer look however shows that the overall success of value   strategies derives mainly from the 1970s and 1980s. ... in the US, value has underperformed growth for over 25 years   since peaking in July 1988. Globally, value experienced a 30% setback   in the late 1990s so that there are now periods with a length of   nearly 13 years over which growth has outperformed. So the answer to ""does it beat the market?"" is  ""it depends..."". Update in response to comment below: the question of risk adjusted returns is interesting.  To quote another couple of fragments from the piece: Since December 1974, [MSCI world] value has outperformed growth by   2.6% annually, with lower risk. This outperformance on a risk-adjusted   basis is the so-called value premium that Eugene Fama and Kenneth   French first identified in 1992... and That outperformance has, however, come with more risk. Historical   volatility of the pure style indices has been 21-22% compared to 16%   for the market. ... From a maximum drawdown perspective, the 69% drop   of pure value during the financial crisis exceeded the 51% drop of the   overall market." One aspect of this - no matter which valuation method you choose - is that there are limited shares available to buy. Other people already know those valuation methods and have decided to buy those shares, paying higher than the previous person to notice this and take a risk. So this means that even after you have calculated the company's assets and future growth, you will be possibly buying shares that are way more expensive and overvalued than they will be in the future. You have to consider that, or you may be stuck with a loss for decades. And during that time, the company will get new management or their industry will change, completely undermining whatever fundamentals you originally considered. "The Investment Entertainment Pricing Theory (INEPT) has this bit to note: The returns of small growth stocks are ridiculously low—just 2.18   percent per year since 1927 (versus 17.47 percent for small value,   10.06 percent for large growth, and 13.99 percent for large value). Where the S & P 500 would be a blend of large-cap growth and value so does that meet your ""beat the market over the long term"" as 1927-1999 would be long for most people."
"I'd argue the two words ought to (in that I see this as a helpful distinction) describe different activities:   ""Investing"":  spending one's money in order to own something of value.  This could be equipment (widgets, as you wrote), shares in a company, antiques, land, etc.  It is fundamentally an act of buying. ""Speculating"":  a mental process in which one attempts to ascertain the future value of some good.  Speculation is fundamentally an act of attempted predicting.   Under this set of definitions, one can invest without speculating (CDs...no need for prediction) and speculate without investing (virtual investing).  In reality, though, the two often go together.  The sorts of investments you describe are speculative, that is, they are done with some prediction in mind of future value.   The degree of ""speculativeness"", then, has to be related to the nature of the attempted predictions.  I've often seen that people say that the ""most speculative"" investments (in my use above, those in which the attempted prediction is most chaotic) have these sorts of properties: And there are probably other ideas that can be included. Corrections/clarifications welcome! P.S. It occurs to me that, actually, maybe High Frequency Trading isn't speculative at all, in that those with the fastest computers and closest to Wall Street can actually guarantee many small returns per hour due to the nature of how it works.  I don't know enough about the mechanics of it to be sure, though." "This is my two cents (pun intended).  It was too long for a comment, so I tried to make it more of an answer.  I am no expert with investments or Islam: Anything on a server exists 'physically'.  It exists on a hard drive, tape drive, and/or a combination thereof.  It is stored as data, which on a hard drive are small particles that are electrically charged, where each bit is represented by that electric charge.  That data exists physically.  It also depends on your definition of physically.  This data is stored on a hard drive, which I deem physical, though is transferred via electric pulses often via fiber cable.  Don't fall for marketing words like cloud.  Data must be stored somewhere, and is often redundant and backed up. To me, money is just paper with an amount attached to it.  It tells me nothing about its value in a market.  A $1 bill was worth a lot more 3 decades ago (you could buy more goods because it had a higher value) than it is today.  Money is simply an indication of the value of a good you traded at the time you traded.  At a simplistic level, you could accomplish the same thing with a friend, saying ""If you buy lunch today, I'll buy lunch next time"".  There was no exchange in money between me and you, but there was an exchange in the value of the lunch, if that makes sense.  The same thing could have been accomplished by me and you exchanging half the lunch costs in physical money (or credit/debit card or check). Any type of investment can be considered gambling.  Though you do get some sort of proof that the investment exists somewhere  Investments may go up or down in value at any given time.  Perhaps with enough research you can make educated investments, but that just makes it a smaller gamble.  Nothing is guaranteed.  Currency investment is akin to stock market investment, in that it may go up or down in value, in comparison to other currencies; though it doesn't make you an owner of the money's issuer, generally, it's similar.  I find if you keep all your money in U.S. dollars without considering other nations, that's a sort of ignorant way of gambling, you're betting your money will lose value less slowly than if you had it elsewhere or in multiple places. Back on track to your question: [A]m I really buying that currency?  You are trading a currency.  You are giving one currency and exchanging it for another.  I guess you could consider that buying, since you can consider trading currency for a piece of software as buying something. Or is the situation more like playing with the live rates? It depends on your perception of playing with the live rates.  Investments to me are long-term commitments with reputable research attached to it that I intend to keep, through highs and lows, unless something triggers me to change my investment elsewhere.  If by playing you mean risk, as described above, you will have a level of risk.  If by playing you mean not taking it seriously, then do thorough research before investing and don't be trading every few seconds for minor returns, trying to make major returns out of minor returns (my opinion), or doing anything based on a whim. Was that money created out of thin air? I suggest you do more research before starting to trade currency into how markets and trading works.  Simplistically, think of a market as a closed system with other markets, such as UK market, French market, etc.  Each can interact with each other.  The U.S. [or any market] has a set number of dollars in the pool.  $100 for example's sake.  Each $1 has a certain value associated with it.  If for some reason, the country decides to create more paper that is green, says $1, and stamps presidents on them (money), and adds 15 $1 to the pool (making it $115), each one of these dollars' value goes down.  This can also happen with goods.  This, along with the trading of goods between markets, peoples' attachment of value to goods of the market, and peoples' perception of the market, is what fluctates currency trading, in simple terms.  So essentially, no, money is not made out of thin air.  Money is a medium for value  though values are always changing and money is a static amount. You are attempting to trade values and own the medium that has the most value, if that makes sense.  Values of goods are constantly changing. This is a learning process for me as well so I hope this helps answers your questions you seem to have.  As stated above, I'm no expert; I'm actually quite new to this, so I probably missed a few things here and there." "Unless you are buying a significant value of your goods in USD then the relative strength of USD versus your local currency will have little to no effect on what the value of your investments is worth to you. In fact only (de|in)flation will effect your purchasing power. If your investments are in your local currency and your future expenses (usage of the returns on the investments) will be in your local currency FX has no effect. To answer your question, however, since all investments involve flows of money there can be no investment (other than perhaps gold which is really a form of currency) that isn't bound to at least one currency. In general investments are expected to be valued against the investor's home currency (I tend to call it ""fund currency"" as I work with hedge funds) as the return on the investment will be paid out in the fund currency and returns will be compared on the same basis. If investments are to be made internationally then it is necessary to reduce, or ""hedge"" the exchange rate risk. This is normally done using FX swaps or futures that allow an exchange rate in the future to be locked in today. Far from being unbound from FX moves these derivatives are closely bound to any moves but crucially are bound in the opposite direction to the hoped for FX move. an example of this would be if I'm investing 100GBP (my local currency) in a US company XYZ corp which I expect to do well. Suppose I get 200USD for my 100GBP and so buy 1 * 200USD shares in XYZ. No matter what happens to XYZ stock any move in GBP/USD will affect my P&L so I buy a future that allows me to exchange 200USD for 100GBP in 6 month's time. If GBP rises I can sell the future and make money on both the higher exchange rate and the increase in XYZ corp. If GBP falls I can keep the future until maturity and exchange the 200USD from XYZ corp for 100GBP so I only take the foreign exchange hit on any profits. If I expect my profits to be 10USD I can even buy futures such that I can lock in the exchange rate for 110USD in 6 months so that I will lose even less of my profit from the exchange rate move." "The response to this question will be different depending which of the investment philosophies you are using.  Value investors look at the situation the company is in and try to determine what the company is worth and what it will be worth in the future. Then they look at the current stock price and decide whether or not the stock is priced at a good deal or not. If the stock price is priced lower than they believe the company is worth, they would want to buy stock, and if the price rises above what they believe to be the true value, they would sell. These types of investors are not looking at the history or trend of what the price has done in the past, only what the current price is and where they believe the price should be in the future.  Technical analysis investors do something different. It is their belief that as stock prices go up and down, they generally follow patterns. By looking at a chart of what a stock price has been in the past, they try to predict where it is headed, and buy or sell based on that prediction.  In general, value investors are longer-term investors, and technical analysis investors are short-term investors.  The advice you are considering makes a lot of sense if you are using technical analysis. If you have a stock that is trending down, your strategy probably tells you to sell; buying more in the hopes of turning things around would be seen as a mistake. It is like the gambler in Vegas who keeps playing a game he is losing, hoping that his luck changes.  However, for the value investor, the historical price of a stock, and even the amount you currently have gained or lost in the stock, are essentially ignored. All that matters is whether or not the stock price is above or below the true value determined by the investor. For him, if the stock price falls and he believes the company still has a high value, it could be a signal to buy more. The above advice doesn't really apply for them.  Many investors don't follow either of these strategies. They believe that it is too difficult and risky to try to predict the future price of an individual stock. Instead, they invest in many companies all at once using index mutual funds, believing that the stock market as a whole always heads up over a long time frame. Those investors don't care at all if the prices of stock are going up or down. They simply keep investing each month, and hold until they have another use for the money. The above advice isn't useful for them at all.  No matter which kind of investing you are doing, the most important thing is to pick a strategy you believe in and follow the plan without emotion. Emotions can cause investors to make mistakes and start buying when their strategy tells them to sell.  Instead of trying to follow fortune cookie advice like ""Don't throw good money after bad,"" choose an investment strategy, make a plan, test it, and follow it, cautiously (after all, it may be a bad plan). For what it is worth, I am the third type of investor listed above. I don't buy individual stocks, and I don't look at the stock prices when investing more each month. Your description of your own strategy as ""buy and hold"" suggests you might prefer the same approach." This is called the gordon growth model (or dividend discount model).  This is one way to value a stock, but in practice no one uses it because the assumptions are that companies will return value to investors solely via regular dividends, and that the growth rate and the required rate of return from investors are constants; among other issues. Basically, diversifying narrows the spread of possible results, raising  the center of the returns bell-curve by reducing the likelihood of extreme results at either the high or low end.  It's largely a matter of basic statistics. Bet double-or-nothing on a single coin flip, and those are the only possible results, and your odds of a disaster (losing most or all of the money) are 50%. Bet half of it on each of two coin flips, and your odds of losing are reduced to 25% at the cost of reducing your odds of winning to 25%, with 50% odds that you retain your money and can try the game again. Three coins divides the space further; the extremes are reduced to 12.5% each, with the middle being most likely. If that was all there was, this would be a zero-sum game and pure gambling. But the stock market is actually positive-sum, since companies are delivering part of their profits to their stockholder owners. This moves the center of the bell curve up a bit from break-even, historically to about +8%. This is why index funds produce a profit with very little active decision; they treat the variation as mostly random (which seems to work statistically) and just try to capture average results of a (hopefully) slightly above-average bucket of stocks and/or bonds. This approach is boring. It will never double your money overnight. On the other hand, it will never wipe you out overnight. If you have patience and are willing to let compound interest work for you, and trust that most market swings regress to the mean in the long run, it quietly builds your savings while not driving you crazy worrying about it. If all you are looking for is better return than the banks, and you have a reasonable amount of time before you need to pull the funds out, it's one of the more reliably predictable risk/reward trade-off points. You may want to refine this by biasing the mix of what you're holding. The simplest adjustment is how much you keep in each of several major investment categories. Large cap stocks, small cap stocks, bonds, and real estate (in the form of REITs) each have different baseline risk/return curves, and move in different ways in response to news, so maintaining a selected ratio between these buckets and adding the resulting curves together is one simple way to make fairly predictable adjustments to the width (and centerline) of the total bell curve. If you think you can do better than this, go for it. But index funds have been outperforming professionally managed funds (after the management fees are accounted for), and unless you are interested in spending a lot of time researching and playing with your money the odds of your doing much better aren't great unless you're willing to risk doing much worse. For me, boring is good. I want my savings to work for me rather than the other way around, and I don't consider the market at all interesting as a game. Others will feel differently. There are all sorts of topics in finance that take a lot of time to learn.  You have valuation (time value of money, capital asset pricing model, dividend discount model, etc.), financial statement analysis (ratio analysis, free cash flow &amp; discounted cash flow, etc.) , capital structure analysis(Modgliani &amp; Miller theories of capital structure, weighted average cost of capital, more CAPM, the likes), and portfolio management (asset allocation, security selection, integrates financial statement analysis + other fields like derivatives, fixed income, forex, and commodity markets) and all sorts.   My opinion of Investopedia is that there is a lot of wheat with the chaff.  I think articles/entries are just user-submitted and there are good gems in Investopedia but a lot of it only covers very basic concepts.  And you often don't know what you don't know, so you might come out with a weak understanding of something.    To begin, you need to understand TVM and why it works.  Time value of money is a critical concept of finance that I feel many people don't truly grasp and just understand you need some 'rate' to use for this formula.  Also, as a prereq, you should understand basics of accrual accounting (debits &amp; credits) and how the accounting system works.  Don't need to know things like asset retirement obligations, or anything fancy, just how accounting works and how things affect certain financial statements.  After that, I'd jump into CAPM and cost of capital.  Cost of capital is also a very misunderstood concept since schools often just give students the 'cost of capital' for math problems when in reality, it's not just an explicit number but more of a 'general feeling' in the environment.  Calculating cost of capital is actually often very tricky (market risk premium) and subjective, sometimes it's not (LIBOR based).    After that, you can build up on those basic concepts and start to do things like dividend discount models (basic theory underlying asset pricing models) and capital asset pricing models, which builds on the idea of cost of capital.    Then go into valuation.  Learn how to price equities, bonds, derivatives, etc.  For example, you have the dividend discount model with typical equities and perpetuities.  Fixed income has things like duration &amp; convexity to measure risk and analyze yield curves.  Derivatives, you have the Black-Scholes model and other 'derivatives' (heh) of that formula for calculating prices of options, futures, CDOs, etc.  Valuation is essentially taking the idea of TVM to the next logical step.  Then you can start delving into financial modelling.  Free cash flows, discounted cash flows, ratio analysis, pro forma projections.  Start small, use a structured problem that gives you some inputs and just do calculations.  Bonuses* would be ideas of capital structure (really not necessary for entry level positions) like the M&amp;M theorems on capital structure (debt vs equity), portfolio management (risk management, asset allocation, hedging, investment strategies like straddles, inverse floaters, etc), and knowledge of financial institutions and banking regulations (Basel accords, depository regulations, the Fed, etc.).    Once you gain an understanding of how this works, pick something out there and do a report on it.  Then you'll be left with a single 'word problem' that gives you nothing except a problem and tells you to find an answer.  You'll have to find all the inputs and give reasons why these inputs are sound and reasonable inputs for this analysis.    A big part that people don't understand about projections and analysis is that **inputs don't exist in plain sight**.  You have to make a lot of judgment calls when making these assumptions and it takes a lot of technical understanding to make a reasonable assumption--of which the results of your report highly depend on.  As a finance student, you get a taste for all of this.  I'm gonna say it's going to be hard to learn a lot of substantial info in 2 months, but I'm not exactly sure what big business expects out of their grunts.  You'll mostly be doing practical work like desk jockey business, data entry, and other labor-based jobs.  If you know what you're talking about, you can probably work up to something more specialized like underwriting or risk management or something else.   Source:  Finance degree but currently working towards starting a (finance related) company to draw on my programming background as well. "What you're asking for is a short-term, large return investment. When looking for big returns in a short period of time, risk is inevitable. The more risk you are willing to assume, the higher your potential returns. Of course, the flip is is that the higher your risk, the higher the potential to lose all your money! Since this is an exercise for school (and not real money and not your life savings) your best bet is to ""go big or go home"". You can safely assume 100% risk! Don't look for value stocks, dividend stocks, or anything that pays a steady return over a long period of time. Instead, look for something risky that has the potential of going up, up, up in the next few months. Are you allowed to trade options in your fake portfolio? Options can have big risk and big reward potential. Penny stocks are super volatile, too. Do some research, look for a fad. In other words, you will most likely lose it all. But you get a little lucky, you could win this thing outright by making some risky investments. A 5% chance of winning $3000 vs 95% of going broke may be pretty good odds if everyone else is value investing for just a few months. You will need to get lucky. Go big or go home!"