Stock And Bond Trading

It's likely that either curiosity or skepticism led you to this article, and I would agree that, for most individual investors, trading is approached in a totally speculative manner. Stock trading, in its more popular forms (Day Trading, Swing Trading, Penny Stock Speculating, etc.) includes none of the elements that a conservative investment strategy would have at its very core: Little if any attention is given to the fundamental Quality of the equities selected. Any Diversification that exists in the portfolio is determined by chance alone and is, at best, a transient result of the selection guesswork. No attempt whatever is made to develop an increasing and dependable stream of Income. But stock trading by individual investors doesn't deserve quite as bad a "rep" as it has earned. After all, its very foundation is Profit Taking, probably the most important (and possibly the most often neglected) of the activities required for successful investment portfolio management. Unfortunately for most non-professional equity traders, loss taking is a more common occurrence.Bond, (and other Income Security) trading is generally avoided by most non-professional traders. Obviously, it takes more investment capital to establish positions in Corporate and Municipal Bonds, Real Estate, or Government Securities than it does in Equities, and the volatility that traders thrive upon is just not a standard feature of the mundane world of debt securities. Surprisingly, most investment advisors and stock brokers have not discovered that there is a more exciting approach to Income Investing that is actually safer for investors and less inflexible in the face of changing interest rate expectation scenarios. Certainly, Wall Street financial institutions pressure their representatives to push individual new issues and/or investment products, but I think that the Market Value fixation that stretches from Wall Street to Main Street is the real culprit. Income securities need to be "valued" for long-term income growth and traded with great pleasure... albeit much less frequently.