Stocks or Real Estate? Or Alternative Investment? Pick one!
 

i think a 70/30 blend of stocks/re is good for the portfolio....with some of the 70% being in REITs....

what do u guys think?

i know there is alot of money sitting on the sidelines right now

you cant use ny as some kinda guideline for home appreciation lol, but generaly investing in re has always beat inflation, the stock market, etc. The nice thing about RE is it's passive income. Plus the tax breaks and shit for re investors is just awesome.

i'd hit it! :pimp

Real estate for me:thumbsup

property for me...

Agree JFK - it's hardly a choice :thumbsup

domain names are another option

real estate for sure

so did the friends of this guy probably

http://money.cnn.com/magazines/busin...ion=2007052205

thats funny, because the domain name industry is gonna boom for a few more decades.

PA is Taking It to Da...
 

I am on real estate

Hey guys check my site.

Stock first, then Real Estate

http://money.cnn.com/galleries/2007/...mag/index.html

Cnn and Forbes choses stocks over real estate.

stocks ...

theres an article about some domain name dude in business 2.0. snatched up all the domain names..plus the .cm ones....

That is because they do not understand real estate at all. There is no way on earth an average joe can beat investing in real estate, by investing in stocks. Comparing 8% or so rise in prices to 10.5% rise in stock prices is like comparing apples with oranges. Even an investor with half a braincell can spot the faulty comparison by miles.

If you factor in leverage, tax advantages, buying in the path of progress/location the picture becomes entirely different.

From their article "The results? Housing delivered a solid but unimpressive annualized return of 8.6%"

Don't make me laugh. A well laid out project, over the course of 10 years, with good mangement will outperform stocks by a largeeeee margin.

The only way to score big with stocks is when youre on the inside, IE, when you issue your own stocks from your own company, or if you have a very profound knowledge of doing business.

:thumbsup :thumbsup

What do you consider a "project"? Buying some property and renting it out? Running something like that takes considerable amount of time, it's more of a business than an investment, you might as well stretch things even further and say buying McDonalds restaurants is an even better investment.

One important detail, everyone ommits from the stocks vs RE analysis, is that RE takes 10x more time to research/manage/buy/etc... so you are completely right it's like comparing apples with oranges.

to buy and manage - yes, but to reseach?

I have no idea about stocks at all, it surely would take some time to do some research as well

or are you saying I should drop $50k into Microsoft and it will grow 15% yearly?

With stocks you have an option of buying "mutual funds"/"index funds"/etc with those there is very limited amount of research needed... you just buy for example s&p index fund, total time required = 5 mins, total cost = $10...

Even with this naive approach, you will be just fine, you will always pay for the fund exactly what it's worth at the given time... With RE (just like with domain names), if you are a clueless idiot, you can get fucked pretty badly, you can very easily overpay 10% or more for a property... (so research in this case is crucial and research = time wasted)

if you chose a bad fund or if there's some crash on the stockmarket like with the dot coms in 2000, then you can also lose a huge part of what you invested....

real estate is easier to predict, stocks are a more involved investment, and certainly not one u can turn your back on. Eitherway, if investigated correctly, both can return a packet of wealth.

I have done well buying dirt and continue to do so. Stocks - I TOTALLY lost my ass in them in 2002, not following someone's fall 2000 advice to sell, then continuing to screw myself over by selling like a mad woman in 2002. No more stocks for me. I still have a few (very few) shares here and there, but land is more attractive to me.

Though I wished I'd bough Crocs stock back when I fell in love with the shoe :(

true, it's in an investment and those usually usually involve risk :) but I can pick up some stocks right this moment, and be sure I paid exactly what they are worth....

I can't just go buy some RE or a domain name without doing any research... (well, I probably can, but 99% chance I will overpay)

choosing an index fund means it's not actively managed so as long as you pick one of the big ones with low fees you can't really pick a *bad* one. Ideally one that isn't just the United States. Also the dot com crash surely decimated the nasdaq but that's not a broad market it's heavily weighted towards technology. So the broader indices definitely went down but nowhere near the amount the nasdaq..

Just as an aside media house prices in the US are down 10% year over year atm (which makes me a bit more interested in buying property)

http://biz.yahoo.com/ap/070524/economy.html?.v=28

buy a reit...real estate investment trust..best of both worlds