I was thinking of just experimenting with the stock market by investing a small sum of money (200-300) in stocks. Would AMD be a good investment?

AMD has made me alot (most) of my cash inflow over the past year.
By Intel so I can make more.

If you haven't done your research on the company (and by posting such a question in this forujm, it's pretty clear you haven't yet), you'll be better off "investing" the money at a casino -- you'll lose less.

lol amd is prone to some swings, but then what isn't. It's trading at a rather low price historically and in light of it's assets, so it would be reasonable to assume theres a good chance it'll rise signifigantly at some point. When that point is and if it will come (any time soon) well thats up to you to figure out! For a spot of day trading, trying to skim off the profit from a small price increase after buying some stock and then selling again might make an amussing and tepid dip into stock trading.

And what might those assets be? CPU designs so inferior to Intel's that Intel is delaying release of new chips because its current ones are already much better than AMD's? Fabs a generation behind in feature size? A lack of high-k technology? A lack of competitive chipset designs? A botched purchase of ATI?

If you wanna throw cash away, give me your money, Ill use it in a more sensible way...

Wow, was that an Intel fanboy rant or not?
Design of the CPU's is superior to Intel design (even Intel fanboys admit this) they have native-quad, HT Link, IMC.... and who is implementing these in their next CPU design...?? The implementation and production of these chips has been less successful though and I'm quite happy to admit that (I'm a bit of an AMD chap ), but the TLB Errata (much like the temp diode 'problem' on the E8xxx) has been completely blown out of proportion...
Fab's are indeed a generation behind, perhaps AMD were sure Core 2 wouldn't be as successful as it has, who knows? It is obviously a much bigger job for AMD to change tooling though, as they are a far smaller company with far fewer resources than Intel. High-K has been announced by IBM, so they technically do have it and implementation is scheduled for 32nm. Chipset designs are very, very good. Plenty of my Intel owning friends would like a chipset like 790FX, plenty of people on the forums have been impressed at it, even Intel-owning people. I don't quite know what a 'botched' purchase of ATi is, unwise, perhaps yes, but 'botched', no. Have ATi recently released some very impressive products, yes, how many people on here (according to their sig) have 3850/3870/3870X2? Mine will hopefully be changing to 3870X2's shortly . With regard to AMD stock, I can't see it going anywher but up, supposedly they will be showing B3 at Cebit, 3870X2 has had a seemingly successful release and the next driver is looking promising for more performance gain, so shareholders are probably looking at AMD shares as a good purchase right now. If I had the spare £ knocking around, I would drop a couple of hundred into them, but I don't have that sort of money at the moment. So perhaps, justify your argument before you post such points...

How does any of that make AMD chips a superior design when the AMD chips offer inferior performance? I don’t care if a CPU is native quad core or not, all I care about is if the chip is power efficient, is fairly cool in operation and gives me the best performance for my money, oh and I want it to work right out the box as well, that’s really not a lot to ask for.

My advice for anyone looking to dabble in the stock market is to buy index funds. Analysts get paid millions of dollars to research the stock market and they barely break even. They do countless hours of research and have a good grasp of markets. However, even with all that they're unable to beat the stock market with any consistancy. With respect to AMD itself, it's a losing proposition and I say that as a shareholder. AMD has produced great products in the past and I believe it will continue to produce great products. The 3870 line is great and I have every reason to believe that the 4000 series will do great as well. Even if they can't beat intel, they should be able to dig themselves in a niche market of providing superior performance/price. Even with all that though, in AMD's best years the company couldn't generate more cash through operations than it's burning through research and development. It's funded it's operations with borrowings and now they're getting more and more expensive with interest payments. The reason I'm holding on to the stock still is tax reasons and the belief that it's possible that they could be bought out. This is very much inherent to gambling though as described by a previous poster. I think AMD presents a good business opertunity if they could acheive some scale, and have it's debt removed from its books.

Did you even read what I wrote?
The chips are a better design, but they haven't worked as well as expected due to Errata etc. Have a think through what I said, before you reply!
Oh yeah and my 6000+ didn't work out of the box, I had to solder it into the socket to get it to work....

There youve said it yourself in your fanboy rant. Designs, products, manufacturing facilities, and brand names, plus intellectual rights and patents. Generation behind? you make it sound like 45nm has been around for years.

Think your off on the chipset point. Wipe the frofth away from your mouth and consult mr google.

No, the soon to be released B3 revision of K10 will have the errata fixed but it will still be slower clock-for-clock than Intel's Kentsfield that was launched about 14 months ago. After five years, K10 only improves over K8 by about 15% clock-for-clock. If that's not piss-poor design evolution, I don't know what is.

I didn't say anything out clock-for-clock, READ what I said!!
The design is better than Intel's design, it's just the Intel chips are faster, that does not make the DESIGN better! And think about what you said....

slower clock-for-clock than Intel's Kentsfield that was launched about 14 months ago. After five years, K10 only improves over K8 by about 15% clock-for-clock. If that's not piss-poor design evolution, I don't know what is.

So you're saying K10 is 15% faster clock-for-clock than K8 (fine, whatever, I'm not going to argue the point) but do you not think K8 evolved over those years?!? FFS, THINK!! Core 2 has changed since it was first announced (what 2.5 years ago?), it has become quicker, FSB is much bigger, more cache, lower power, and it has had a die shrink in the latest release. Before you start bashing your keyboard with your head, perhaps you should learn how to research.
So yeah, compare like with like if you have to....
Perhaps how does Phenom compare with B3 Q6600s? (If they were the first stepping, I don't know....)

I don't think investing $200-$300 is a good idea. The stock has to go way up just to recover your buying and selling fees.

The cheapest place I've seen is Scottrade, $7 trades.

7 to buy plus 7 to sell = 14

314/300= 1.0466666


That means that the first 5% of the gain (if you do gain) will be used just to pay the fees of buying and selling.


Throw the money in an HSBC online savings account. That's who I use and recommend.

The minimum amount of money I suggest you invest is $1000. And of course, remember that you CAN LOSE MONEY IN THE STOCK MARKET!!! (You can of course gain too!)

The best I've ever done was investing in Google @ 188 and selling @ 390.

Yes, we read what you wrote.
But the problem is your analysis.

The purpose of a CPU is to process data.
AMD's chips process less clock for clock.
AMD's chips run at a much lower clock.
AMD's chips use much more power. (Even 65nm vs 65nm)
AMD's FASTEST Quad Core processor is slower in both clock rate and performance per clock than Intel's SLOWEST.

A professor of my in college had a very simple saying:
"If it's good in theory, but not in practice: It's not good theory."