900. What Did Benjamin Graham Mean by Earnings Stability in The Intelligent Investor?
Yes - this is exactly what it means.  No losses (negative earnings).   With today's accounting methods, you might want to determine whether you view earnings including or excluding extraordinary items.   For example, a company might take a once-off charge to its earnings when revising the value of a major asset.  This would show in the "including" but not in the "excluding" figure.   The book actually has a nice discussion in Chapter 12 "Things to Consider About Per-Share Earnings" which considers several additional variables to consider here too. Note that this earnings metric is different from "Stock Selection for the Defensive Investor" which requires 10 years. PS - My edition (4th edition hardback) doesn't have 386 pages so your reference isn't correct for that edition.  I found it on page 209 in Chapter 15 "Stock Selection for the Enterprising Investor".

901. Can PayPal transfer money automatically from my bank account if I link it in PayPal?
As the other answers stated: Yes PayPal will transfer money from your bankaccount automatically if your PayPal balance isn't sufficient. Let's add some proof to the story: (Note, I am in the EU, specifically the Netherlands, situation might be different in other parts of the world) If I login to PayPal and go to my wallet, I have a section that looks like this:  If I click on it, I am presented with a screen with details about the connection.  Note the "Direct debit instruction". If I click on the "view" link I am presented with the following text (emphasis mine): [snip some arbitrary personal details] This authorisation allows (A) PayPal to send instructions to your bank account and (B) your bank to debit your account in accordance with the instructions from PayPal. As part of your rights, you are entitled to a refund from your bank under the Terms and Conditions of your agreement with your bank. A refund must be claimed within 8 weeks starting from the date on which your account was debited. Your rights are explained in a statement that you can obtain from your bank. Below this text is a button to delete the authorization.

902. Can I default on my private student loans if I was an international student?
What are the consequences if I ignore the emails? If you ignore the emails they will try harder to collect the money from you until they give up. Unlike what some other people here say, defaulting on a loan is NOT a crime and is NOT the same as stealing. There is a large number of reasons that can make someone unable to pay off a loan. Lenders are aware of the risk associated with default; they will try to collect the debt but at the end of the day if you don't have money/assets there is not much they can do.   As far as immigration goes, there is nothing on a DS-160 form that asks you about bankruptcies or unpaid obligations. I doubt the consular officer will know of this situation, but it is possible. It is not grounds for visa ineligibility however, so you will be fine if everything else is fine. The only scenario in which unpaid student loans can come up relevant in immigration to the US is if and when you apply for US Citizenship. One of the requirements for Citizenship is having good moral character. Having a large amount of unpaid debt constitutes evidence of a poor moral character. But it is very unlikely you'd be denied Citizenship on grounds of that alone.  I got a social security number when I took up on campus jobs at the school and I do have a credit score. Can they get a hold of this and report to the credit bureaus even though I don't live in America? Yes, they probably already have.  How would this affect me if I visit America often? Does this mean I would not ever be able to live in America? No. See above. You will have a hard time borrowing again.  Will they know when I come to America and arrest me at the border or can they take away my passport? No. Unpaid debt is no grounds for inadmissibility, so even if the CBP agent knows of it he will not do anything. And again, unpaid debt is not a crime so you will not be arrested.

903. Why invest for the long-term rather than buy and sell for quick, big gains?
There are people (well, companies) who make money doing roughly what you describe, but not exactly. They're called "market makers". Their value for X% is somewhere on the scale of 1% (that is to say: a scale at which almost everything is "volatile"), but they use leverage, shorting and hedging to complicate things to the point where it's nothing like a simple as making a 1% profit every time they trade. Their actions tend to reduce volatility and increase liquidity. The reason you can't do this is that you don't have enough capital to do what market makers do, and you don't receive any advantages that the exchange might offer to official market makers in return for them contracting to always make both buy bids and sell offers (at different prices, hence the "bid-offer spread"). They have to be able to cover large short-term losses on individual stocks, but when the stock doesn't move too much they do make profits from the spread. The reason you can't just buy a lot of volatile stocks "assuming I don't make too many poor choices", is that the reason the stocks are volatile is that nobody knows which ones are the good choices and which ones are the poor choices. So if you buy volatile stocks then you will buy a bunch of losers, so what's your strategy for ensuring there aren't "too many"? Supposing that you're going to hold 10 stocks, with 10% of your money in each, what do you do the first time all 10 of them fall the day after you bought them? Or maybe not all 10, but suppose 75% of your holdings give no impression that they're going to hit your target any time soon. Do you just sit tight and stop trading until one of them hits your X% target (in which case you start to look a little bit more like a long-term investor after all), or are you tempted to change your strategy as the months and years roll by? If you will eventually sell things at a loss to make cash available for new trades, then you cannot assess your strategy "as if" you always make an X% gain, since that isn't true. If you don't ever sell at a loss, then you'll inevitably sometimes have no cash to trade with through picking losers. The big practical question then is when that state of affairs persists, for how long, and whether it's in force when you want to spend the money on something other than investing. So sure, if you used a short-term time machine to know in advance which volatile stocks are the good ones today, then it would be more profitable to day-trade those than it would be to invest for the long term. Investing on the assumption that you'll only pick short-term winners is basically the same as assuming you have that time machine ;-) There are various strategies for analysing the market and trying to find ways to more modestly do what market makers do, which is to take profit from the inherent volatility of the market. The simple strategy you describe isn't complete and cannot be assessed since you don't say how to decide what to buy, but the selling strategy "sell as soon as I've made X% but not otherwise" can certainly be improved. If you're keen you can test a give strategy for yourself using historical share price data (or current share price data: run an imaginary account and see how you're doing in 12 months). When using historical data you have to be realistic about how you'd choose what stocks to buy each day, or else you're just cheating at solitaire. When using current data you have to beware that there might not be a major market slump in the next 12 months, in which case you won't know how your strategy performs under conditions that it inevitably will meet eventually if you run it for real. You also have to be sure in either case to factor in the transaction costs you'd be paying, and the fact that you're buying at the offer price and selling at the bid price, you can't trade at the headline mid-market price. Finally, you have to consider that to do pure technical analysis as an individual, you are in effect competing against a bank that's camped on top of the exchange to get fastest possible access to trade, it has a supercomputer and a team of whizz-kids, and it's trying to find and extract the same opportunities you are. This is not to say the plucky underdog can't do well, but there are systematic reasons not to just assume you will. So folks investing for their retirement generally prefer a low-risk strategy that plays the averages and settles for taking long-term trends.

904. Is inflation a good or bad thing? Why do governments want some inflation?
Sensitive topic ;) Inflation is a consequence of the mismatch between supply and demand.  In an ideal world the amount of goods available would exactly match the demand for those goods.   We don't live in an ideal world. One example of oversupply is dollar stores where you can buy remainders from companies that misjudged demand.  Most recently we've seen wheat prices rise as fires outside Moscow damaged the harvest and the Russian government banned exports. And that introduces the danger of inflation. Inflation is a signal, like the pain you feel after an injury.  If you simply took a painkiller you may completely ignore a broken leg until gangrene took your life. Governments sometimes "ban" inflation by fixing prices.  Both the Zimbabwean and Venezuelan governments have tried this recently.  The consequence of that is goods become unavailable as producers refuse to create supply for less than the cost of production. As CrimonsX pointed out, governments do desperately want to avoid deflation as much as they want to avoid hyperinflation. There is a "correct" level and that has resulted in the monetary policy called "Inflation targetting" where central banks attempt to manage inflation into a target range (usually around 2% to 6%). The reason is simply that limited inflation drives investment and consumption.  With a guaranteed return on investment people with cash will lend it to people with ideas.  Consumers will buy goods today if they fear that the price will rise tomorrow. If prices fall (as they have done during the two decades of deflation in Japan) then the result is lower levels of investment and employment as companies cut production capacity.  If prices rise to quickly (as in Zimbabwe and Venezuela) then people cannot save enough or earn enough and so their wealth is drained away. Add to this the continual process of innovation and you see how difficult it is to manage inflation at all.  Innovation can result in increased efficiency which can reduce prices.  It can also result in a new product which is sufficiently unique to allow predatory pricing (the Apple iPhone, new types of medicines, and so on). The best mechanism we have for figuring out where money should be invested and who is the best recipient of any good is the price mechanism.  Inflation is the signal that investors need to learn how best to manage their efforts. We hide from it at our peril.

905. Responsible investing - just a marketing trick?
You are correct that, barring an equity capital raise, your money doesn't actually end up in the company. However, interest in their stock can help a company in other ways; Management/board members hopefully own shares or options themselves, thus knowing that "green" policies are favorable for the stock price (as your fund might buy shares) can be quite an incentive for them to go green(er).  Companies with above average company share performance are also often viewed as financially healthy and so creditors tend to charge lower interest for companies with good share performance.  Lastly, a high share price makes a company difficult to take over (as all those shares have to be acquired) and at the same time makes it easier for the company to perform takeovers themselves as they can finance such acquisitions by issuing more of their own shares. There is also the implication that money flowing towards such green companies is money flowing out of/away from polluting companies, for these "dirty" companies the inverse of the previous points can hold true. Of course on the other hand there is quite an argument to be made that large enough "green" funds should actually buy substantial positions in companies with poor environmental records and steer the company towards greener policies but that might be a hard sell to investors.

906. Investing in income stocks for dividends - worth it?
is it worth it? You state the average yield on a stock as 2-3%, but seem to have come up with this by looking at the yield of an S&P500 index.  Not every stock in that index is paying a dividend and many of them that are paying have such a low yield that a dividend investor would not even consider them.  Unless you plan to buy the index itself, you are distorting the possible income by averaging in all these "duds". You are also assuming your income is directly proportional to the amount of yield you could buy right now.  But that's a false measure because you are talking about building up your investment by contributing $2k-$3k/month.  No matter what asset you choose to invest in, it's going to take some time to build up to asset(s) producing $20k/year income at that rate.  Investments today will have time in market to grow in multiple ways. Given you have some time, immediate yield is not what you should be measuring dividends, or other investments, on in my opinion.  Income investors usually focus on YOC (Yield On Cost), a measure of income to be received this year based on the purchase price of the asset producing that income.  If you do go with dividend investing AND your investments grow the dividends themselves on a regular basis, it's not unheard of for YOC to be north of 6% in 10 years.  The same can be true of rental property given that rents can rise. Achieving that with dividends has alot to do with picking the right companies, but you've said you are not opposed to working hard to invest correctly, so I assume researching and teaching yourself how to lower the risk of picking the wrong companies isn't something you'd be opposed to. I know more about dividend growth investing than I do property investing, so I can only provide an example of a dividend growth entry strategy: Many dividend growth investors have goals of not entering a new position unless the current yield is over 3%, and only then when the company has a long, consistent, track record of growing EPS and dividends at a good rate, a low debt/cashflow ratio to reduce risk of dividend cuts, and a good moat to preserve competitiveness of the company relative to its peers.  (Amongst many other possible measures.)  They then buy only on dips, or downtrends, where the price causes a higher yield and lower than normal P/E at the same time that they have faith that they've valued the company correctly for a 3+ year, or longer, hold time. There are those who self-report that they've managed to build up a $20k+ dividend payment portfolio in less than 10 years.  Check out Dividend Growth Investor's blog for an example.  There's a whole world of Dividend Growth Investing strategies and writings out there and the commenters on his blog will lead to links for many of them. I want to point out that income is not just for those who are old.  Some people planned, and have achieved, the ability to retire young purely because they've built up an income portfolio that covers their expenses.   Assuming you want that, the question is whether stock assets that pay dividends is the type of investment process that resonates with you, or if something else fits you better.  I believe the OP says they'd prefer long hold times, with few activities once the investment decisions are made, and isn't dissuaded by significant work to identify his investments.  Both real estate and stocks fit the latter, but the subtypes of dividend growth stocks and hands-off property investing (which I assume means paying for a property manager) are a better fit for the former.  In my opinion, the biggest additional factor differentiating these two is liquidity concerns.  Post-tax stock accounts are going to be much easier to turn into emergency cash than a real estate portfolio.  Whether that's an important factor depends on personal situation though.

907. Opportunity to buy Illinois bonds that can never default?
If you give money to a person or entity, and they don't have the ability to pay you back, it doesn't matter if they are legally required to pay you.

908. Can a shareholder be liable in case of bankruptcy of one of the companies he invested in?
Not normally, for a limited liability company anyway. In extreme circumstances a court may "lift the veil" of incorporation and treat shareholders as if they were partners. If you are an office bearer or a director that is found to have breached duties/responsibiities then that is another matter. Dim views can be taken of shonky arrangents for companies formed for activites not of a bona fide business nature too.

909. Can after-hours trading affect options pricing?
There is a white paper on "The weekend effect of equity options" it is a good paper and shows that (for the most part) option values do lose money from Friday to Monday. Which makes sense because it is getting closer to expiration. Of course this not something that can be counted on 100%.  If there is some bad news and the stock opens down on a Monday the puts would have increased and the calls decreased in value. Article Summary (from the authors): "We find that returns on options on individual equities display markedly lower returns over weekends (Friday close to Monday close) relative to any other day of the week. These patterns are observed both in unhedged and delta-hedged positions, indicating that the effect is not the result of a weekend effect in the underlying securities. We find even stronger weekend effects in implied volatilities, but only after an adjustment to quote implied volatilities in terms of trading days rather than calendar days."  "Our results hold for puts and calls over a wide range of maturities and strike prices, for both equally weighted portfolios and for portfolios weighted by the market value of open interest, and also for samples that include only the most liquid options in the market. We find no evidence of a weekly seasonal in bid-ask spreads, trading volume, or open interest that could drive the effect. We also find little evidence that weekend returns are driven by higher levels of risk over the weekend.  "The effect is particularly strong over expiration weekends, and it is also present to a lesser degree over mid-week holidays. Finally, the effect is stronger when the TED spread and market volatility are high, which we interpret as providing support for a limits to arbitrage explanation for the persistence of the effect." - Christopher S. Jones & Joshua Shemes You can read more about this at this link for Memphis.edu

910. Assessing risk, and Identifying scams in Alternative Investments
10 to 20% return on investment annually. "When I hear that an investment has a 10%+ return on it I avoid it because...". In my opinion, and based on my experience, 10% annually is not an exageration. I start to ask questions only if one talks about return of 30% annually or more. These kind of returns are possible, but very rare.  What sort of things do we need to look out for with alternative investment? First the quality of the website and the documentation provided. Then the resume of the founders. Who are those guys? I check their LinkedIn profile. If they have none, I am out. A LinkedIn profile is a minimum if you manage an investment company. I also look for diversification and this is the case with Yieldstreet. How do we assess the risks associated with alternative investments? I would never put more than 10% of my capital in any investment, alternative ones included. I also try to find financial information on the promoter itself. In Yieldstreet case check the legal advisor. I remember an international fraud case I analyse. The promoter I investigated had seven small trust involved: in British Virgin Islands, in Panama, in Holland, in Portugal, in the United States and Canada plus a banking account in Switzerland and the biggest shareholding company in the Isle of Man. No need to talk about what happened after. The investors were all non residents in the juridictions involved and no legal recourse were possible. They lost everything. These promoters regularly change juridictions to avoid detection. As far as Yieldstreet is concerned, what I read and checked seems interesting. Thanks for your question. I will check it out myself more. I am also a very cautious investor. To evaluate alternative investments is difficult , but no need to be afraid or to avoid them. We are accredited investors after all.

911. Buying a multi-family home to rent part and live in the rest
A professional home inspection will clue you in on any problems you might be buying, so it's important in any real estate transaction. If the seller finances the loan, you need a lawyer. It might be a nice opportunity - being in the right place at the right time.  You just have to investigate all angles.

912. Ghana scam and direct deposit scam?
It's a scam. Here's someone who paid "Josie" 2000 pounds and lost it all Here's a Google search result list of how this softcore porn actor, Josie Ann Miller, is being used as the face and name of scams

913. Understanding stock market terminology
One of the most useful ways to depict Open, High, Low, Close, and Volume is with a Candlestick Chart. I like to use the following options from Stockcharts.com: http://stockcharts.com/h-sc/ui?s=SPY&p=D&yr=0&mn=3&dy=0&id=p57211761385

914. Table of how many years it takes to make a specified return on the stock market?
Well depends but "on average" the stock market has historically returned somewhere around 10% per year.  Note, this can vary wildly from year to year see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S%26P_500#Market_statistics So it would be roughly 2.8 years to get your 30% if you happen to get the average market return for those 3 years, but the chances of that happening exactly are slim to none.  You could end up with +50% or -30% over that ~3 year period of time - so the calculation doesn't do you that much good for that short period of time, but if you are talking a span of 30 years then you could plan using that as a very rough ballpark. Good rule of thumb is you shouldn't put any money in the stock market you think you will need anytime in the next 5 years. Formula to figure out total gain would be  Principal x (1+ rate of return) ^ years

915. What could cause a stock to trade below book value?
The key to evaluating book value is return on equity (ROE). That's net profit divided by book value.  The "value" of book value is measured by the company's ROE (the higher the better). If the stock is selling below book value, the company's assets aren't earning enough to satisfy most investors. Would you buy a CD that was paying, say two percentage points below the going rate for 100 cents on the dollar? Probably not. You might be willing to buy it only by paying 2% less per year, say 98 cents on the dollar for a one year CD. The two cent discount from "book value" is your compensation for a low "interest" rate.

916. What is a call spread and how does it work?
A bullish (or 'long') call spread is actually two separate option trades.  The A/B notation is, respectively, the strike price of each trade. The first 'leg' of the strategy, corresponding to B, is the sale of a call option at a strike price of B (in this case $165).  The proceeds from this sale, after transaction costs, are generally used to offset the cost of the second 'leg'. The second 'leg' of the strategy, corresponding to A, is the purchase of a call option at a strike price of A (in this case $145). Now, the important part: the payoff.  You can visualize it as so. This is where it gets a teeny bit math-y.  Below, P is the profit of the strategy, K1 is the strike price of the long call, K2 is the strike price of the short call, T1 is the premium paid for the long call option at the time of purchase, T2 is the premium received for the short call at the time of sale, and S is the current price of the stock.  For simplicity's sake, we will assume that your position quantity is a single option contract and transaction costs are zero (which they are not). P = (T2 - max(0, S - K2)) + (max(0, S - K1) - T1) Concretely, let's plug in the strikes of the strategy Nathan proposes, and current prices (which I pulled from the screen).  You have: P = (1.85 - max(0, 142.50 - 165)) - (max(0, 142.50 - 145)) = -$7.80 If the stock goes to $150, the payoff is -$2.80, which isn't quite break even -- but it may have been at the time he was speaking on TV. If the stock goes to $165, the payoff is $12.20. Please do not neglect the cost of the trades!  Trading options can be pretty expensive depending on the broker.  Had I done this trade (quantity 1) at many popular brokers, I still would've been net negative PnL even if NFLX went to >= $165.
