Immersing Myself in Stocks

Welcome to LearningStocks.net! This site will chronical my stock trades and my thoughts on investing in financial markets. My hope is that this will become not only a Stock Journal, but also a resource for learning about investing. By teaching myself I hope that others may also learn about stocks, and that this site will be a catalyst to make money in the stock market by learning from my investment mistakes and successes.

My current day job is as an IT professional, and I entered the stock market without any knowledge or training in the field. I imagine the same is true for many others and they most likely have similar results to what I have had – not great.  Starting my stock learning journey at the height of the Bull market in April, 2008, I thought it would be easy MONEY. Well, I soon found out that making money trading stocks is NOT easy. The market started its latest crash later in 2008 and my stocks went with it in the epic decline. I can’t stand losing money! (who does?) and I’m not one to give up either. So I decided I would learn as much as I could before buying any more stocks. I began reading books on investing and studying the market in earnest. But reading can only take me so far; I need to immerse myself to really learn. I am striving to take the advice of William O’Neil’s How To Make Money in Stocks; “Don’t just dabble in stocks…DIG IN.” Another recurring imperative is to keep a stock journal and I thought a website would be a great way to do just that and immerse myself in stocks at the same time.

Of course, I’m not going to quit my day job (although sometimes I would like to). My job is what allows me to actually play this stock market game and I am able to follow the markets somewhat while I am at work too. If I couldn’t then I probably wouldn’t be in stocks at all.  But most of my research is done during the few hours I have between work, spending time with my fiancé, and sleep; and that probably puts me at a big disadvantage to those who really do do this for a living.

Stocks are basically a zero sum game. In essense you buy a stock because you think it’s going up from someone who is selling because he thinks it’s NOT going up. Only one of you is right; so you’re either losing money and the guy on the other end is making money, or you’re making money and the guy on the other end is losing money. So maybe I’m stupid for even trying (my girl certainly thinks so), but still I’m determined to be successful and I’m confident I will be.  Plus it’s exciting!