Investing in the ownership of the capital stocks of businesses that are listed on the World markets is as risky today as it has ever been. Do you feel lucky or do you pay close attention to World events and the financial information that is provided by the Governments of the countries that are the most modern societies on Earth?
In the financial community are you known as a fundamentalist or a technician? Both methods of selecting stock purchases and/or sales work well for the investor at one time or another during a long term trading cycle. Then again, are you purchasing the stocks of companies that do business primarily within a country or countries that are economically healthy?
One must also analyze the company that the investor intends to purchase a percentage of ownership for future returns of dividends and stock appreciation for the short and/or the long term. If you do not already know, hundreds of good companies are suffering greatly from the huge increase in the price of crude oil. The resulting cost plus inflation that has taken hold within many countries has caused many otherwise healthy corporations to go bankrupt within a very short period of time.
The resulting record job losses of working people within the United States of America is directly related to just how economically stressed many businesses are, in order to remain in business. It is most likely that those who seek out and do purchase the stock of such distressed companies are taking great risks in hopes of reaping great rewards within the future. Keep in mind that people and/or other corporations purchase the products and/or services that are made, provided and/or resold by every business.
The final consumer is also the user of such goods and/or services and most, if not all, countries are as economically healthy as the majority of the population of people that live within those particular countries. As such, there are three major indicators that will tell the investor when it is wise to purchase a percentage of ownership of any kind of business.
The first is the rate of unemployment for workers within the country in question. The second is the rate of property foreclosures and the third is the weekly number of new claims for unemployment compensation that are applied for by people who have recently lost their job. To a lesser degree, the number of new jobs that are created within a country can be used in order to determine if that particular country is still experiencing some percentage of growth within its depressed economy.
If you have not already determined, investing in businesses within such economically depressed economies is a truly foolish thing to do. To make matters worse, some economic data is not as accurate as it should be and some important economic data will never be known to the investor because it is impossible to gather such information that can or is another indicator to determine when to enter a market and risk ones investment capital.
There is one economic indicator whose actual number, or percentage of the working population, is truly impossible to accurately determine. That indicator is the number of homeless people within the society who are now on the street with nothing to eat.
All of those people are suffering greatly and many of those homeless people will die within the near future. Therefore, a healthy economy is only as healthy as the majority of the people who live and work within that economic environment. In order to remain healthy and alive people must be able to earn a living wage, and that means that they must be employed to do so.