investment advice

my wife and i were interested in macquarie reflexion but after some good advice from investEd members we didnt, we are still looking to invest some money in short and long term investments any advice will be greatly appreciated. Are shares in the current climate a good option.

Short term, cash = king in my opinion. If you have a loan with offset, park your money there. Otherwise, high interest savings accounts are the way to go.

Longer term is a different matter. I have no suggestions there.

Longer term you could look at Compare Funds :: Managed Fund Comparison Charts and Statistics and see which funds or indexes have done well longer term.

One arguement I've read is that we are closer to the bottom now than we were back at November, so buying in now (and averaging down your average unit purchase cost) would pay off longer term.

With the current volatility in the sharemarket I would highly reccomend that you be very careful where you invest.

If you are at all in doubt go and see a specialist in financial planning first or learn all you can about share trading before entering todays market.

I personally have been investing/trading for quite a few years now and I am still active in the stockmarket at the moment,but I am being very careful and minimising my exposure to risk.

If you do want to venture into the stockmarket,right now there are good quality companies going at bargain basement prices but whether you get the best lowest price is a matter of luck for no one knows how far the stockmarket will go down or when it will start to go up again.

Plus you might have to wait a while for long term profits to eventuate.

I personally am looking for more long term investments rather than a quick profit at the moment.

One thing a lot of people forget is that for every Seller in the market place there has to be a Buyer otherwise nothing happens.

One trader thinks negatively while the other thinks the opposite.

What school of thought do you belong too?

We justed edged that little bit closer to the bottom with the Dow dropping another 7% on Thursday night.

U.S. markets tumble again - CNN.com

Reality is - no one knows where the bottom is!

I would not suggest buying into the market until it starts moving up again. And not just a few positive days, it needs to at least get back above the 52 Week Moving average before I would even consider moving my money back into the market. At the moment the 52 Week Moving Average for the All Ords is about 5650 points and coming down each week. So a long way from where we are now.

The market is clearly trending down, so to buy in now I think would be a bit of a gamble as no one knows when it is going to turn around.

There is just so much negative sentiment out there at the moment, which needs to settle down.

Our market has fallen about 37% since the peak. Markets can and do fall a lot more than that. Take a look at the Nikkei (Japan's equivalent of our all ords), it fell 82% over a period of 1989 to 2003. Imagine how happy you would be if you bought shares in that market when it had fallen 37%!

I'm not saying our market will fall that far, because like everyone else I have no idea where the bottom is - all I know is that I will stand on the sidelines until most of the negativity is gone, and the market starts moving up again making higher highs and higher lows and gets back above the 52 week moving average.

Of course everyone needs to make up their own minds on where they are at and their own risk levels, but that is my take on it.

best decison you ever made! had you invested you would have paid interest for the next 7 years for nothing! with 0% chance of a capital gain. the dynamic hedging has reduced all holdings to around the 40% invested 60% cash as at the end of september. And after the recent efforts in the sharemarket I'd expect that to be even lower.

If you have a serious amount of $$ ($100K plus) a portfolio of direct Blue chip shares should do very well over the long run, so banks, BHP, RIO, WPL WES, WOW .... (i've added further holdings in ANZ, CBA, BHP & WES to my portfolio over the last 2 weeks).

buying into an imputation/income style australian share fund may also be a good option if you don't have the dollars to fund direct holdings.