re: Buying stock long term

Yikes.

Ok, first off, slow your roll. You're still pretty young, right?. I think you're getting ahead of yourself a little bit right now. Time in the market is a great thing, but start making some money first and then start putting some of every paycheck in there.

2nd - You don't need to be looking for big dividends or really any stocks at all. You have decades before you need income from retirement assets. Save some cash and put it in a index ETF like VTI for right now.

3rd - consider re-evaluating your current positions. Buying 2.5 shares at a time is going to kill you in commissions. Now don't get me wrong, I don't have crazy buying power, but I usually try to buy at least $2000 worth of shares at a time to lesson the hit of the commissions. That number has gone up from $1k when I first bought 3 shares of AAPL at $330 in college. But regardless, buying $75 of intel with a $7 commission puts you in the hole by 10% to start. Also, PAL is a big time speculative play. I own 5k shares but thats less than 1% of my portfolio. For me, its worth the risk. For you, I doubt it. That's a big time spec play for being such a large % of your money. My advice is to stay out of the MJ/Penny thread for now.

4th - if you havent already - think about just holding the cash in a savings account for a rainy day fund. or at least put it in a fairly safe fund in your IRA if you really want it in your roth account