The Stock Market Thread

I don't understand what you are getting at.

 

Looks like we're entering the historic rally portion of the week.

 

I'm just buying and selling. We're up, sell! We're below where we sold, buy!

It isn't much, but a couple hundred bucks a week.

 

I'm treating it like a poker game. There's some weeks I do pretty good

 

I buy and hold. never sell.

 

Smarter. I was running Apple up and down several weeks ago, and missed a day to buy (like I did yesterday) and never got back below my last sell point. And then it jumped up to $320 a share, essentially me leaving $1500 or so on the table over the last month.

 

I came in on Apple at $241 per on April 1. Two months later it's $341.

 

best way to do it. market timing is almost impossible even for the experts. what happens is when it's directional people make money for a long time. then something unexpected happens and they lose their shirt.

 

Sometimes. The only way to really make money is to play volatile stocks. And volatile stocks are... volatile.

But I got pinched hard in two stocks last year, and rather than take a loss of several hundred, I held... and both filed bankruptcy. So instead of taking a few hundred loss, I ate $7,000 due to holding.

 

I've got a long term strategy I never touch other than move stuff around once or twice a year. I do kind of want to set up a play account though where I take more risk.

 

Set a limit, don't add more money. Whatever it is you are comfortable losing.

 

my wife plays the game and doesn't end up better off than me, though you hear all about her successful peaks.

 

I'm think like $1,000. If it goes well, add over time. Basically going to use the rules I use when going to a casino or my rare trips - I'm willing to lose X and not a penny more.

 

i'm just saying stock picking isn't easy for people who make millions a year trying to do it for a living. also the computers take away the easy gains on volatility these days.

 

just invest it as aggressively as possible in indexes and forget about it. the problem is most people can't do that.

 

the problem with stop loss trading is that you tend to get stopped out at the worst possible time when markets are bottoming out either long term or temporarily. like yesterday as an example. though i've been bearish for weeks, but if i wasn't you wouldn't want to miss the rally. I don't own anything i don't want to own long term. almost every time i've gone against that rule i've lost money.

 

There's a real gambler's fallacy at work in our minds when we are just looking at price fluctuations. Better to just define rules and follow them like you are saying.

 

absolutely and the studies bare that out. human nature means that when the market is too high people think it will go up and too low people think it will go down. fear and greed. I got calls from a decent amount of people to sell out their accounts within days of the bottom of the market. One on the actual day of the bottom of the market. Same thing happened in 08. No calls now.

 

Definitely not easy. Fun though.

 

Most people should just take a few hundred to the casino, instead and call it what it is - gambling.