How do my IRA Withdrawals Get Taxed During Retirement?
Different IRAs have different tax treatments. Traditional IRAs, as well as SEPs, SIMPLEs, and 401(k)s are all taxed as income in retirement. Roth IRAs are not taxed. Traditional IRAs and the other pretax accounts will have distributions that are also includable in the Modified Adjusted Gross Income calculations which may subject them to 3.8% Medicare surtax, as well as the income calculations which determine what portion of Social Security income may be taxable in retirement. Continue reading...
Where Can I Get Help With My IRA Investments?
There are several sources of information and help that you can tap into for your IRA. Your IRA is a vital component of your future retirement assets. The decision on how to invest is entirely yours: you might want to manage the assets on your own, or look for professional help. The choice of Financial Advisor who would help manage your IRA is similar to the choice of any other professional. For more, see “How Can I Get Help With My IRA Investments?” Continue reading...
What is Form 1099-R?
IRS Link to Form — Found Here Sources of retirement plan income, such as pensions, annuities, and IRAs, will be associated with a 1099-R filing. The form is filed by the company making the distribution. The taxpayer uses the information on it for when filing income taxes. The IRS receives Form 1099-R from the companies making distributions from retirement plans. They have categorized all annuity contracts as retirement plans by default, so those are included, as are pensions, profit sharing plans, other forms of employer-sponsored retirement plans, cash-value life insurance distributions, and individual retirement accounts (IRAs). The company making the distribution sends the 1099-R to the IRS and the account owner. Continue reading...
What is the Rectangle Top (Bearish) Pattern?
The Rectangle Top pattern forms when the price of a pair is stuck in a rangebound motion, and it bounces between support and resistance levels. Two horizontal lines are formed (top: 1, 3, 5) and (bottom: 2, 4) as a result. Depending on who gives up first – buyers or sellers – the price can Breakout in either direction. This pattern is commonly associated with directionless markets. Usually the pattern performs better when there is a strong uptrend leading into the formation. Continue reading...
How to use a Gann Fan in trading
W.D. Gann developed a suite of technical analysis tools around the 1930s, with Gann Fans being among the most essential in his toolkit. Gann fans are a collection of lines placed on a price chart that, in theory, help traders gauge potential price changes. Gann theorized that prices were likely to be sequentially bound by markers; that is, if a price broke through one marker, it would be likely to use the next ones as its new support or resistance level. The range between the lines gets wider the further they extend from the origin, which makes Gann fans suitable for long-term charting in which the number of traders and the size of total market cap grows over time. Continue reading...
How to use Stochastics in trading
Stochastic oscillators are a popular momentum indicator used in technical analysis and prized for their accuracy and clarity. They can provide overbought or oversold signals to traders and even be combined with other indicators, like moving averages or the Relative Strength Index (RSI), to unearth insights that support profit-maximizing trades. Stochastics gauge an asset’s closing price in comparison to a range (measured 0-100) of closing prices over a mutable (though most often 14-day) time period, creating overbought (readings of 80-plus) and oversold (readings of 20 or under) trading signals. Continue reading...
What is Bank Credit?
Bank Credit is the amount of loaned capital that an individual or business is capable of getting from a bank at a given time. This amount will be based on a series of evaluative metrics such as the total amount of assets an individual has, home equity, income, liquid net worth, work history, credit rating, and so forth. An individual can only borrow so much at a time, and, using these variables, a banker can essentially estimate how much credit could be extended that a given individual at that time. Continue reading...
What is Return on Assets?
Return on Assets, or ROA, is an efficiency ratio which quantifies how much profit a company can generate with the assets it has. Return on Assets is a ratio of the net income of a company divided by the amount of assets it has on the books. It can also be synonymous with Return on Investment (ROI), at least at a corporate level. Theoretically this gives analysts an idea of how much profit a company could generate by buying more equipment or other assets, or how efficiently they use the assets in which they have invested. Comparing companies in a specific industry to their peers with ratios such as this one can be illuminating. Continue reading...
What are Bond Ratings?
The possibility of a company or municipal government defaulting on their bond obligations, usually by going bankrupt, is a real one. For this reason, all bonds are rated according to the financial stability of the issuer. A look at the history of corporate and municipal debt will illuminate the fact that the possibility of the issuer being unable to pay its obligations to bondholders is a very real one. There is an established system of bond ratings that gives a rough estimate of the bond's reliability. Continue reading...
How are option prices computed?
Option prices are decided by the buyers and sellers in the marketplace, but are tied closely to the amount of risk inherent in the agreed upon expiration date and strike price. Option prices change as the market factors in the relevant information. The main factor is the strike price. The closer an option’s strike price is to the actual market price of a security, the higher it’s price will be. Once it’s in-the-money, it has inherent value that makes it essentially the same price as the market security that underlies it. The expiration date of the contract is also a factor because if the expiration date is closing in, and the strike price is not quite close enough to the market price of the underlying asset, there is little chance that the option will be useful. Continue reading...