Let’s get started

Going to keep this short and simple: I’m a web designer / developer / lawyer / photographer / person and I (relatively) recently decided I’d like to experiment with stock trading.

Good idea? Don’t know, probably not. But it seems fun and a valuable skill and the whole investment business has been fairly democratized with the help of useful mobile apps like Robinhood and websites like Nasdaq.com.

I started several months ago with just a few hundred dollars and cautiously invested in some well-known market leaders. I didn’t get very far. One of those leaders was Twitter, which crashed shortly after. It took 6 months to recover what I lost.

My next move was to start investing in booming industries like water, which I admittedly learned about from the movie The Big Short. This actually went very well — nothing but up. This newfound confidence encouraged me to put several more hundred dollars into various companies across several industries. I didn’t lose my money, but growth came to a standstill. Out of two thousand dollars now invested, I made about 80 in return. Seemed low.

I decided to stop playing around and actually learn how to invest wisely. I picked up the very aptly named How to Make Money in Stocks and started absorbing the extremely complicated pseudo science of chart analysis.

That’s where I am now. Still reading the book and cautiously trying to analyze volume and price movements to identify soon-to-be “breakout” stocks. I’ve learned about a few patterns so far (cup/saucer-and-handle and W patterns, to be exact) but am still pretty ignorant of everything stock related.

With that said, this page, along with my (also aptly named) twitter handle newtotrading2, will be where I document my wins and losses. I’ll also post breakdowns of my analysis of various stocks, what my portfolio is made up of and why, and results of my predictions (whether right or wrong). I’m doing this for no reason in particular; just seems fun. And I guess it’ll help me learn a thing or two.

Wish me luck. Hopefully I won’t, oh I don’t know, lose all my money tomorrow.

Ciao.