Investing Fun

For years I've admired the idea of earning income from the stock market. But I've always assumed that were I to join in, I'd just be one of the millions of "donators" that makes the smart investors more money. You can surely imagine the type. Someone that is possibly cautious at first, but experiences success early on and starts to feel invincible. Or perhaps you can imagine a cousin of the chronic gambler that, win or lose, continues to play for the thrill of the risk. I'm not the type that would sell my car on a long shot promising a big payoff, or invest with money I need to pay bills next month. But lets be honest - nobody wants to lose the money they've invested. Unfortunately the facts are in order to make money here, you've got to take it from someone else.

More recently, the urge to see what it's like playing stocks has grown. I saw an ad to sign up for an investment newsletter and decided to give it a read. It shows up daily and talks about anything that's going on in the world that might affect stock prices. The main objective of the newsletter is to sell investment advice that the business offers. The prices range from tens to thousands of dollars per year for such advice. I figured just exposing myself to "stock chat" was more than enough for me at the time. And I was very pelased with that decision, too. Somedays I really wasn't in the mood and I just deleted the email. Other times I'd learn quite a bit from the ods and ends they would dole out while trying to slip their hooks into my wallet. In the end, curiosity won out and I signed up for one of their more conservative services, which also happened to be one of the least expensive.

So what did my money get me? As promised, in addition to hearing an update to the state of the market, I had access to the stock symbols that were supposed to make money off the latest news. I read about which companies have excellent dividends, which were solid investments based on earnings and all those uninteresting abbreviations. It was good to be allowed behind the curtain to see how to actually profit from the stories that happen every day.

The next step, which I knew was coming was to identify and use a broker. That's something that to me, sounded both intimidating and relatively easy to do. I imagined I just had to rise above my fears of letting someone else handle my money, and pick up the phone book to call one. As it turned out, there was in fact, only one option I could call. And after contacting them, I was not impressed with what they had in mind. They gave me visions of stable 5% returns for the rest of my life. Thanks, but no thanks. That left me with either going out of town or looking at online trading. Being the online junky that I am, I decided to start comparing my choices there. You probably know the big names. I'll not be advertising them here. Starting out small I had one goal: cheap broker fees. After reading all I could stand, I made my decision and sent the winner some cash.

Once my deposit showed up, I began to marry my investment advice newsletter to actual trades with my online account. I took several positions I felt very safe with and began to wait.... This was about mid October of 2008. As you probably know about that time - everything, and I mean 99% of the market if not more, lost money that month. I had to watch as every day my prize picks sank lower and lower and lower. Finally I hit my pre-set limits and had to close my positions. How crappy is this luck? I picked the worst time in my entire life to buy stocks! Thanks to my limits, I was able to get out with about 75% of my cash intact, ready to go at it again. However I'm once bitten and twice shy so to date, only about 20% of my online balance has been re-entered into the market. And it's performance thus far has been lackluster at best.