My Stock Trading Strategies

Started in my Corporate Finance Class

I am not a professional stock trader. I just started getting into the stock market when I took my MBA classes at the University of Redlands about 4 years ago where one of my subjects, Corporate Finance, our professor divided us into groups where each group were to paper trade  stocks starting with an amount of $100,000 and all groups that get to a $1,000,000 investment portfolio were given an extra 0.5 to our final grade.

Early Successes – I was Just Lucky

Our group did reach the $1M mark and so did many of my classmate. It appeared easy then, so I thought, so that was the day I started signed up on Scottrade and started trading with an amount of $1,000. After a week, the portfolio value was $1,100. Shared the news with my wife who agreed I invest in more and added more funds to fill in a total of $3,000. Consistently enough, after a week, I made $3,300 as my total portfolio value in a week.

This gave me a false sense of how easy the stock market is, until it started going downhill. Most of my trades that did well were mostly based on recommendations from Mad Money, The Motley Fool and Seeking Alpha, barely understanding the factors involved in picking stock, just riding with what was mentioned a lot and a lot of positive words that sound good was my early go to strategy. Buy in at a low limit at the last support price and sell at a limit of whatever I “felt” the stock price would reach, where often, I’d watch the stock intensely, sometimes constantly adjusting the sell limit price like chasing a moving target with no scientific reasoning behind it. In the end, in the long run I was giving my money back to the market.

Teaching Myself to Trade in the Stock Market

To be more familiar how everything works, I also attended many Scottrade live event seminars at their various offices. Many of them were free and I wanted to maximize every free situation to learn. I watched whatever tips I can get from whatever program on CNBC, being on the Rich Dad mailing list I came across one of Rich Dad’s events on how to invest in the stock market. It was a free 1 day event and it was presented by Scott Stewart. It was very insightful for me but of course you cannot learn everything in one sitting. But they did recommend a more advanced course, which did cost a good amount of money. Long story short, I enroll into two master courses, I spent a lot coming from 2 credit cards, plus I drain all my funds in my Scottrade account to enroll in these courses. The classes were very informative, it was loaded with tons of great insights, but I felt the flow was slow, not that engaging, and somewhat dragging to go through. Sessions were very long and tiring. But I still learned from them. As much as I wanted to apply what I learned, I drained my account and needed to save up and replenish funds again. Their preferred trading analysis platform that time was the obsolete MachTrader.

4 Year Later, Saved Up. Joined the Market Again

This time I supposed to be better educated and I relied on TV a lot, the news, and installing a bunch of iPhone and iPad apps like: StockTouch, StockIdealPro were my main favorites initially. I had a few wins there and there. But the issue was the same, I was returning to the market what I earned. Until I decided to install the free iPhone app VectorVest, and started to learn more after I signed up as a paid user, and went through many of their training sessions. After all the years, I feel more confident it trading stocks but also there is just a lot more to learn.

There are many people out there talking about stocks and I do not attempt to be an online expert or what. But what I do want to do is every week or as often or seldom as a trade, I will share my trades, why I chose such stocks, if I plan to swing trade it or hold the position. I’ll share my gains and my losses and is just putting out there. And if there are more experienced or less experienced traders out there that want to give any feedback, I am welcoming them all. So starting today, all my trades will be in the Trading category of my blog.

Today, I’m in a cash position, coming out of a small loss, thanks to my stop settings and waiting for my funds to get settled on Wednesday. So my next trade will be sometime Wednesday to Friday and I’ll share my trades and why.

Thanks for reading up to this point. 🙂

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