Neal Clayton
08-23-2009, 1:41 AM
this time i can't help it ;).
i've played the stock market for about 4 years now. and for the most part, i've always done well. made the down payment on my house in my first year, made enough to pay for all the lumber needed to restore said house the next, and had made about 35% this year up until a couple of months ago. i made money on oil stocks last year and got out before oil crashed, and then had the discipline to stay out before the fall crash as well, telling myself that i'd wait until the next president came into office and that got all sorted out before getting back in. all of which turned out to be right so i was pretty confident in my actions when i came back in this spring. maybe too confident :(. i had a close friend that needed a loan so had to withdraw half of what i started with this year for that, and then i bet wrong on oil prices a couple of months ago and lost half of what was left. then i got a bit greedy when i hit another upswing and lost half again (i trade options, so unlike the stocks which you can sit on when you make a mistake until they come back up, if you bet wrong on options, come third friday of every month, that money is gone).
that left me with about 11 thousand left in my account and no good ideas. not only no good ideas, but very hesitant after two big losses, which is not a good state of mind for someone who trades options. if you don't know what to do before your predictions happen, you're throwing good money after bad.
so i took a few weeks off to analyze what i did wrong, and make some new rules for myself, and jumped back in three weeks ago. at that time i had seen my account go from 40 thousand to 60, and then after the loan mentioned above and a string of losses i was down to just past 10. ouch.
welp, my first rule was to keep more in reserve to clean up mistakes should they be made again. so i jumped back in with 6 thousand, just over half of what i had left. in the past three weeks i've turned the 6 into 43 thousand, plus my reserve money is still there. so that's the loan i made covered even if that takes years to be repaid, the losses made back, and a few thousand profit on top of it all. and i'm pacing the floor waiting for monday because i'm about 90% sure i'm in exactly the right spot to double up again on the 15 thousand i still have invested next week.
the only regret is that i didn't more smartly analyze what i was doing months ago and apply the same rules then, if so lord knows how much i'd have made by now. but as they say back home, cest la vie.
and now that i see what i did wrong and see others doing the same things i'm doing when i look at the daily volumes, i can say with absolute certainty that there are billionaires being made by the hundreds right now. if people thought the rich were getting richer and the poor getting poorer before, it didn't hold a candle to now. there are people making ungodly amounts of money in these market conditions. i'm not sure what the policy ramifications of that will be next year, but i'm going to participate until then either way ;).
i've played the stock market for about 4 years now. and for the most part, i've always done well. made the down payment on my house in my first year, made enough to pay for all the lumber needed to restore said house the next, and had made about 35% this year up until a couple of months ago. i made money on oil stocks last year and got out before oil crashed, and then had the discipline to stay out before the fall crash as well, telling myself that i'd wait until the next president came into office and that got all sorted out before getting back in. all of which turned out to be right so i was pretty confident in my actions when i came back in this spring. maybe too confident :(. i had a close friend that needed a loan so had to withdraw half of what i started with this year for that, and then i bet wrong on oil prices a couple of months ago and lost half of what was left. then i got a bit greedy when i hit another upswing and lost half again (i trade options, so unlike the stocks which you can sit on when you make a mistake until they come back up, if you bet wrong on options, come third friday of every month, that money is gone).
that left me with about 11 thousand left in my account and no good ideas. not only no good ideas, but very hesitant after two big losses, which is not a good state of mind for someone who trades options. if you don't know what to do before your predictions happen, you're throwing good money after bad.
so i took a few weeks off to analyze what i did wrong, and make some new rules for myself, and jumped back in three weeks ago. at that time i had seen my account go from 40 thousand to 60, and then after the loan mentioned above and a string of losses i was down to just past 10. ouch.
welp, my first rule was to keep more in reserve to clean up mistakes should they be made again. so i jumped back in with 6 thousand, just over half of what i had left. in the past three weeks i've turned the 6 into 43 thousand, plus my reserve money is still there. so that's the loan i made covered even if that takes years to be repaid, the losses made back, and a few thousand profit on top of it all. and i'm pacing the floor waiting for monday because i'm about 90% sure i'm in exactly the right spot to double up again on the 15 thousand i still have invested next week.
the only regret is that i didn't more smartly analyze what i was doing months ago and apply the same rules then, if so lord knows how much i'd have made by now. but as they say back home, cest la vie.
and now that i see what i did wrong and see others doing the same things i'm doing when i look at the daily volumes, i can say with absolute certainty that there are billionaires being made by the hundreds right now. if people thought the rich were getting richer and the poor getting poorer before, it didn't hold a candle to now. there are people making ungodly amounts of money in these market conditions. i'm not sure what the policy ramifications of that will be next year, but i'm going to participate until then either way ;).