I have to say, the last few weeks have been really good for me—in terms of the stock market.
I decided a couple months ago that I wanted to start playing around in the stock market. So I dumped a small amount of money into Scottrade with the intent of trading stocks like crazy. It turns out that I don’t trade, buy and sell stocks as often as I first thought I would. I had this vision of trading every 15 minutes…. “Buy Low, Sell High!”, “Limit order!”, etc.
Well, I started buying what I (thought) I knew best. Tech Stocks. I bought a bunch of Palm stock well before the notorious Pre came out, and boom, made a bunch (little bit) of money. Buy low, sell high! Wahoo! I bought and sold some Microsoft, Garmin, Google, and a few other companies. Then I decided to expand my horizons. I bought some Coca-Cola, because I am pretty sure I can keep the company afloat in tough economic times, and that is what we would call the blue-chip stock. Slowly but surely, it has done pretty well for me.
Then, came the bank stocks. I started investigating stocks like Bank of America, Citigroup, and JP Morgan Chase, and thought to myself… “they have to go up!” So I bought a bit in each, and boy, do I wish I bought a whole bunch more. Citigroup was originally $1/share, and is now up around $3.25/share. Bank of America was around $3.25/share and shot up to $14.50/share. The reason I like these bank stocks is because, as Uncle Sam has shown us, we’ll bail anybody out at this point. So it’s like a protected investment—they’re not going anywhere. Further, once they recover and start trading at their previous costs per share, I’m hoping to make a heft profit off of them.
So that’s my investing experience… Limited knowledge earned me a good bit of change in no time at all. Now, if I had a ton of money, you better believe I’d consult my investment advisor, but why not have a bit of fun while the stock market starts to recover from the shambles it’s been in as of late? Use that funny money, you might just make it back two times over!