New investor looking for strategy tips

Sounds like you're not paying enough attention to the big picture of how much sway outside news actually has on stocks day to day. People/Institutions may see nothing wrong with their positions, but if there's some outside noise suggesting market will head lower, then a good deal of them will shuffle their portfolios around for time being, and then jump back in when the dust settles. Stocks only have so much news to report each quarter, the outside news is what drives the day to day action.

Oil and Fed talk dominate the market, and now you can throw in "Brexit" fears until they vote next week.

If oil goes up, market goes up. If oil goes down, market goes down. If Fed says no interest rate hike, market goes up. If fed says interest rate hike, market goes down. If Fed says a peep about cautious optimism for future in some random guest speech, market reacts. If world markets close lower, US markets likely goes down. If world markets close higher, US markets likely go up.

And the list goes on (and obviously there are some investments that would do the opposite in these situations, and see gains).

Fed meeting this week was an all but guaranteed trigger of down market leading up to Wednesday afternoon, because fear strikes investors from not knowing what happens next.

Now I'm not saying you need to be a news junkie to stay on top of all this, but just stay current with govt and world news. Whatever major fear is out there will make a ripple in the markets. And once you realize this, you can better time your buys.

For example, I'm mostly in bank stocks, and I'm waiting to add to my positions because I know it doesn't make any sense to buy bank stocks a couple days before fed meeting results are posted. General consensus is no rate hike this month, so it'd make no sense to buy today just to lose ~5% tomorrow once the news drops and people that can't bother to wait another month put their money elsewhere for better gains. And should the Fed decide to surprise us by raising rates, then I'm still buying in after the 3 day sell-off that led up to the meeting, so it's a win/win decision to avoid overpaying in the short-term.

/r/stocks Thread