Should I talk about my stocks?
I like your question and think it is a pretty good one.  Generally speaking I would not suggest talking about your stock picks or wealth.  Here is why: 1)  Most people are broke.  Seventy-eight percent of the US population report living paycheck to paycheck.  More than a majority do not have enough in savings to cover a $500 repair to a car or dryer.   What kind of money advice will you get from broke people (the general population)?  Answer:  Bad. 2)  It targets you for jealousy/negative feelings.  If you discuss this kind of thing with your broke friends they will have negative feelings toward you.  This is not necessarily a bad thing.  If you want to build wealth a aspect of that is having wealthy friends.  They will have the kind of disposable income to do the kinds of things you want to do.  They can alert you to good investment opportunities.  And your income will tend to increase.  Most people's income resides within 10% of their 10 closest friends.   3)  You can be targeted for law suits.  Given that personal injury attorneys work on contingent, they are very good at picking on defendants with deep pockets or really good insurance.  Knowing that you have significant investments will put a bit of a target on your back.  Having said all of that, you could participate in groups with a similar interest in investing.  Back in the late 80's investment clubs were all the rage, and you might be able to find one of those online or at the local library or something.  That would be a far safer. No, there is no significant harm to discussing this. Outside of possibly getting bad advice, excessive advice, or complaints that others just aren't interested...
"There's no free lunch. Here are some positions that should be economically equivalent (same risk and reward) in a theoretically-pure universe with no regulations or transaction costs: You're proposing to buy the call. If you look at the equivalent, stock plus protective put, you can quickly see the ""catch""; the protective put is expensive. That same expense is embedded in the call option. See put-call parity on Wikipedia for more: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Put%E2%80%93call_parity You could easily pay 10% a year or more for the protection, which could easily eat up most of your returns, if you consider that average returns on a stock index might be about 10% (nominal, not real). Another way to look at it is that buying the long call and selling a put, which is a synthetic long position in the stock, would give you the put premium. So by not selling the put, you should be worse off than owning the stock - worse than the synthetic long - by about the value of the put premium. Or yet another way to look at it is that you're repeatedly paying time value on the long call option as you roll it. In practical world instead of theory world, I think you'd probably get a noticeable hit to returns just from bid-ask and commissions, even without the cost of the protection. Options cost more. Digressing a bit, some practical complications of equivalency between different combinations of options and underlying are: Anyway, roughly speaking, any position without the ""downside risk"" is going to have an annual loss built in due to the cost of the protection. Occasionally the options market can do something weird due to supply/demand or liquidity issues but mostly the parity relationships hold, or hold closely enough that you can't profit once expenses are considered. Update: one note, I'm talking about ""vanilla"" options as traded in the US here, I guess there are some somewhat different products elsewhere; I'm not sure exactly which derivatives you mean. All derivatives have a cost though or nobody would take the other side of the trade." I'm telling you *my* experience,  which I know well.   I say I drive through occasionally,  meaning 2 to 3 times a week depending on traffic on my commute to work.   In no way did I attempt to explain *your* experience.     The sidewalks are great were I live.  The city I live in has a great public transportation system and goes to great lengths to provide and encourage the public to use it.   This means that cross walks are abundant,  sidewalks are clean (on the specific area I am talking about), and it isn't littered with garbage or broken glass.    The way in which the public chooses to ignore this luxury is insane and risky.   In order to shave a few minutes off of their walk they choose to risk their life and put their own bodies health in the hands of the several drivers around them.   Their kids also do this, although kids aren't the best at personal awareness,  which is why adult supervision is necessary and lacking in this area.    I am speaking about my personal experience with this issue.   I should have clarified that I don't mean to generalize for all areas in the US,  however,  I am sure my experience is not necessarily unique. I had a situation like that happen at work. A girl in H.R. did that and milked maternity leave until her six months were up. Then called in and said she was resigning. My boss was talking about her to some of the staff saying she'd probably not going to come back and that the H.R. Director should be looking to replace her position. He was right, her husband had a high paying tech job and she didn't need the income so why would she stick around a dysfunctional company?   The other maternity leave was a girl in my department who got pregnant by a dude a few cubicles away. She had to go on disability 3 months before her maternity leave officially kicked in. She had my boss over a barrel and convinced him to pay the difference between disability and her salary for the entire period she was out. It appears she threatened to quit unless she got a raise and another promotion because she came back with a better title and her pay check got larger from then on. She basically held a bunch of incomplete work over his head as ransom for months. As of July when I left she just got around to doing it...so basically it took her a year to complete a project that should have taken about a week or so. I never intended to get into a big debate on taxation. My point was that a buyback is the sane as a divided.  Would you agree to that? Here's an interesting test. Does he have the same problem with dividend producing stocks? If he does then how else are firms supposed to give s return to investors?  (Don't even think about saying through price appreciation because I'm sure you also have a rant for the drive for stock price.)  This isn't a do we tax or not.  That's overly broad for this piece.  Also he isn't talking about taxing away profits but using taxes to cause businesses to make investments.  Wouldn't you agree that if that extra factory was unproductive if it wouldnt have had an economical case to be invested in otherwise? Issuing taxes as a blunt tool to cause businesses to throw money at random projects is about the definition of misallocation.  Can we agree to this, absent a taxation debate i generally avoid like the plague?  You really are in a corner on how a company effectively passes a return to those who invested in them without subverting the whole pricing mechanism. Unless that is your point to do. Government control for all investments yeah! I'm a retired stockbroker/Registered Investment Advisor. My initial discussions with prospects never had a fee.  Restricted stock is unsaleable without specific permission from the issuing company, and typically involves time specifc periods when stock can be sold and/or amounts of stock that can be sold. Not for DIY. Financial planners may be able to assist you, if they are conversant in restricted stock, though that's not a common situation for most clients. Any stockbroker at a major firm (Merrill Lynch, UBS, Royal Bank of Canada, Morgan Stanley, JP Morgan, etc.) will be knowledgeable and advise you (w/o charge) how to trade the stock. Always talk to more than one firm, and don't be in a hurry. If you feel comfortable with the discussion, you can pursue a deeper relationship. In my professional experience, clients valued service, accessibility, knowledge. Price was way down on the list; many of my clients were not wealthy people- they just needed help navigating a very confusing (and necessary) part of their lives. Good luck. "Chris - you realize that when you buy a stock, the seller gets the money, not the company itself, unless of course, you bought IPO shares. And the amount you'd own would be such a small portion of the company, they don't know you exist.  As far as morals go, if you wish to avoid certain stocks for this reason, look at the Socially Responsible funds that are out there. There are also funds that are targeted to certain religions and avoid alcohol and tobacco. The other choice is to invest in individual stocks which for the small investor is very tough and expensive. You'll spend more money to avoid the shares than these very shares are worth.  Your proposal is interesting but impractical. In a portfolio of say $100K in the S&P, the bottom 400 stocks are disproportionately smaller amounts of money in those shares than the top 100. So we're talking $100 or less. You'd need to short 2 or 3 shares. Even at $1M in that fund, 20-30 shares shorted is pretty silly, no offense.  Why not 'do the math' and during the year you purchase the fund, donate the amount you own in the ""bad"" companies to charity.  And what littleadv said - that too." "There's the question whether knowledge about unannounced products is actually ""material"" if everyone (the public) knows that something new will be released. If you work at Apple on the development of the iPhone 8, that's not material. If you worked at Apple and you knew that they stopped developing new phones, that would be very, very, very material information.  The important thing as far as the stock market is concerned is what sales look like, and that's not something you know as a product developer." If an advisor uses asset allocation and risk management in conjunction with financial planning, performance will be adequate for each client's goals in the LONG RUN. Past performance doesn't mean shit for the future and imo, bragging on performance in a prospect meeting signals that they don't have any other value to lean on and likely take on more risk than they should to show that performance.