I've only $100 a month to invest, and just yesterday my "top secret" stock jumped nearly 20%.
Find a no-load nice mutual fund and set up automatic payments.
If you are buying individual stocks with $100/month, then the only person that is going to make any money is the broker. If you are looking for "hot stocks" then you aren't really investing, you are gambling. It's fine to do that, but just realize that this is what is going on. If you *really* are intent on buying stocks, you actually will do better by just closing your eyes and throwing a dart at a newspaper, than thinking about it.
Not really. The thing is that the current state of the economy is dependent on decisions that were made about a year ago. Things are going as well as can be expected. About a year ago, I was at a talk in which some economists gave some numbers as far as "how quickly can we produce jobs", the answer was pretty depressing, and what is going on now is pretty close to the projections.
It's really not a complicated calculation. You figure out the amount of credit available in the economy, then you figure out how much credit gets taken out of the system to cover bad loans that are not yet recognized. This gives you the amount of credit that is left to produce new jobs, and this gives you the estimated change in employment, and the projections are more or less what is going on right now. You then stare at the equations to see if there is something you can change. The big variable is the amount of government spending, but those are subject to both political and economic limits. One other big limitation is time. If you have a decade or even three years, you can make some pretty fundamental changes to the economy. If you have only a year or an hour, you can't.
Moving this back to "why do banks hire physics Ph.D.'s?" Physics Ph.D.'s are used to dealing the multi-scale system. One of the basic questions you ask when you analysis a physical system is "what are the time scales involved?" For stellar evolution, nuclear timescales are about a billion years, thermal timescales are about a thousand, and pressure time scales are in seconds or minutes. The same sort of thinking is useful in economic systems. It takes Congress about a year or two to pass a law, making a regulation takes a few months, economic panics take place on the order of hours, and high frequency trading takes place on the order of seconds.
I'm more interested right now in avoiding things that people are going to regret twenty years from now.
Part of the problem with "fixing the economy" is that the economy isn't your standard engineering problem, where is there is single answer. You come up with plan A, but it turns out that people hate plan A, and you can't get people to agree with it. So you come up with plan B, which runs into the same problem. About the time you come up with Plan Q, you might have something that people don't hate, and you it's plan Z1 that finally gets passed.
So the problem with coming up with "a plan to fix the economy" is that you have to be flexible because if you aren't, you aren't going to be able to get anything useful done, since if you have this magic plan to fix the economy, you'll just get frustrated that no one listens to you.
So rather than by starting by stating what the plan is, you start by listening to people to figure out what the political constraints are, and then coming up with the best that you can do given the constraints.
There are people that come do this sort of thing for a living (i.e. listen to people and come up with things that can be done). They are called politicians, and for the big general questions, they are better at coming up with workable solutions than I am. I talk too much and I'm extremely argumentative, and if you want someone to come up with something that really works, you need someone that's a much better listener than I am.
Trying to keep this close to physics and careers... One thing that I am better at, is if you give me a set of rules, then I am not that bad at figuring out what the consequences of those rules are, so rather than being a politician, the area that I'm most useful at is if you give me a piece of legislation, and ask me a specific question on what the consequence of a part of that legislation is.
Writing legislation is a lot like computer programming or physics theory, and it's something that I find relaxing. So the type of question, I'm better at answering is not "how do we fix the economy?" but rather "if we change this definition in subsection D, paragraph 2, line 3 from bank holding companies to financial holding companies, what happens?" Most people don't have the patience to learn a set of obscure rules and definitions, learn a totally new language, and then sit down for several days patiently working through the consequences of changing this rule. Physics Ph.D.'s tend to like this sort of thing.
