[...]An IPO minor league in Hong Kong for startups[...]…

Both sucked into the blackness of big corporations blackholes.
So success is difficult. Which means people need money to invest that they feel they can lose.

And going Far East means failure at home and USA reduced to third world status.
Who has the money controls the roost. Just ask the World Bank and Thailand or Greece!

And finally there’s no BIG IDEA on the horizon to make the tills ring like railways, electricity, cars, radios TVs, VCRs, PCs or digital stuff of the past. Apples’s 15 years of stellar growth has ended now its steady as she goes, unless it goes into biology! Motivated Visionaries are hard to find.

Oh and the best car ‘the Goddess’ — AND STILL NOT SURPASSED 50 yrs LATER — and its manufacturer (run by engineers) went bankrupt because idiots did not like it. So success is difficult.

I don’t think the JOBS Act approach is going to provide enough capital. If a small investor can invest no more than $2000 in a crowd-funded investment, what’s the payoff for him? Let’s say he’s willing to throw down $20,000 on 10 companies that look promising. Maybe he gets extremely lucky and and one of those 10 turns out to be the next Apple (or, Salix Pharmaceuticals to randomly take a successful small cap ). In that case, maybe over many years he sees a 25-fold increase in his investment, which would be nice, but $50K is not going to change his lifestyle appreciably . And, what are the odds of spotting that budding company from all the others ? Since most small businesses fail, even if our small guy is a good stock picker, six or seven of the companies he invests in are going to go out of business, losing most if not all of his investment. The three or four that do well are going to take a long time do it. It seems like pretty long odds. Better to bet on an indexed mutual fund and hope that the stock market meets its historical average of 8 or 9% growth a year, which will double your money in a decade or so.

Second thought: being able to borrow, as in Hong Kong, on that intrinsic $30 million of value that a company is perceived to have just because they’re listed on the exchange – well that seems like a recipe for disaster on the order of America’s credit swap debacle. Or maybe more like Enron.

In short, a concept called technical analysis is my key to trading. It is using mathematical functions to create charts that give you insight into the psychology of the market. You don’t need to know the math, software already do that for you.

Suggestions:

- Toni Turners books are a good start. Easy to understand BUT they are not really enough to trade without hurting yourself.
- Keep reading, lots of good books on Amazon on trading and technical analysis. Good resources online.
- My trading platform is ThinkOrSwim. It is free, awesome, incredibly powerful. The other resources, videos… from TDAmeritrade are also very good.
- Ignore the almost all news sources as far as understanding the stock market. The IGNORANT talking to the ignorant.