Mourad Haroutunian, BA, MA
Mourad joined Profit Confidential as a financial writer. He has worked for several media companies across three continents, in many different languages, and on various platforms, all with a single factor in common: news. It was Bloomberg where Mourad fell in love with stock market writing, Proactive Investors where he became fascinated with U.S. and Canadian equities, and MT Newswires where he felt at one with speed and real-time reporting.
Addicted to online reading, Mourad has a passion for personal finance, world politics, and intercultural relations. He holds a BA and MA in journalism and mass communication.
Mourad likes to explore every corner in the cities he lives in or travels to by driving highways and walking down the streets and alleys. Away from the digital world, Mourad enjoys spending time with his little son and daughter.
Get to know Mourad…
What was your first stock market investment?
My first investments were really unforgettable moments in my life. I was closely watching a friend who had invested a bulk of his savings in an amazingly quickly appreciating blue chip. He bought the stock at $9.00 and saw it rising to $10.00, then swiftly plunging to $5.00 within a few weeks. At that time, I decided—with my below-zero stock trading knowledge—to invest $5,000, thinking the stock couldn’t drop further. I made a $50.00 gain in my first trade and you can’t imagine how excited I was. I decided to stay away a bit to see how things would be going. However, repeated chatter by my friend and others that the price would definitely go up to $6.00 prompted me to re-invest the $5,000. That was a catastrophe. The stock never went up again and I sold it a year later at $3.00, losing $2,000. The stock then nosedived to $0.30 on the heels of the 2008 financial crisis. The lesson: don’t listen to amateurish projections and more importantly, eradicate your stock trading illiteracy…
What is your investment philosophy?
Stick to the trading ABCs that most experts advise: invest only the amount of money that you would not need in the coming two years; every investment you purchase should not exceed five percent of your portfolio; when you are 25 years old, put 75% of your portfolio in stocks and the rest in low-risk securities; and flip that ratio when you are 75 years old (but make it 50%:50% when you are 50 years old). One more basic tip that I like: don’t wait until the share price goes down beyond 10%—sell it.
Apple Stock Buybacks a Disaster: Analyst Over the weekend, Trip Chowdhry, a research analyst at Global Equities Research, said that Apple Inc. (NASDAQ:AAPL) CEO Tim Cook is doing exactly what Albert Einstein defined as insanity—doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. The consequences,…
Wall Street fell in late morning trading, reversing an earlier gain, after data showed the U.S. economy is not growing as fast. As of 11:04 a.m. in New York, the Dow Jones Industrial Average was down 0.6% at 16,058. The S&P 500 declined 1.0% to 1,884, while the…
Analyst: Dividend Cuts Coming for Big Oil Weak oil prices have hammered profits at energy giant Chevron Corporation (NYSE:CVX). Now some analysts are wondering if the dividend for CVX stock is safe. On Friday, Chevron reported a quarterly loss for the first time since 2002. One analyst has…
Apple Inc. No Longer Top Tech Company Google’s parent Alphabet Inc (NASDAQ:GOOG) has overtaken Apple Inc. (NASDAQ:AAPL) as the most valuable public company in the world for the first time in four years—more disappointing news for owners of Apple stock. As of 9:35 a.m. in New York on…
Warren Buffett has hiked his stake in Phillips 66 (NYSE:PSX) stock to more than 13% in January, up from about 10% last August. Over three days late last month, Buffett’s conglomerate Berkshire Hathaway Inc. (NYSE:BRK.A) bought another 2.5 million shares of the independent refinery giant for $200 million.…
