Glorified Gambling

 

Ok, not much time to write. The weather outside is gorgeous and sunny. I haven't been out yet so I can't comment about the temperature, but from inside it looks heavenly. I'm hoping to go for a quick walk after writing this, so I may be brief.

I woke up to the news that a stock I invested in mysteriously tanked over night, after the stock market closed. What's weird about that is that during the day I'd considered selling the stock since it hit an all time high and I made a couple hundred dollars off of it. Instead, what I did was raise my stop-loss to just above my break-even point since the stock had been performing so well. This way, I thought, I'm minimizing my risk and locking in a meager profit as I let the stock keep climbing. I patted myself on the back for the mature investment strategy and didn't think any more of it. I couldn't believe my eyes when I woke up to the news that the stock had toppled 50% in after-hours. In a single day I went from making hundreds to losing hundreds.

Let this be a lesson to you all. If you're considering investing in the stock market to make a few quick bucks: don't. 

What really irritates me about this is that I took so much care to be careful. I researched the stock, analyzed the technicals, saw that the company had good earnings and great relative market strength. I watched how it performed for a couple of weeks before investing and set up tight stop-losses so that my losses would be confined to only 3% initially, and then locked in a profit after a week of it performing well. I did all I could to make sure I wasn't taking unnecessary risk. The only thing that could happen, I knew, would be a massive gap-down which would cause my stop-loss not to trigger. When looking at the stock's history, something like that would have been highly unusual, so it wasn't worried about it. Well, it happened. Go figure. 

Every time I try to jump in on a stock, without fail, something like this happens. I'm officially giving up on investing in stocks. From now on I'm just plugging that money up in high-yield savings accounts and IRA's. Fuck throwing money away. 

That loss could have paid for all the dental work I'll need over the coming month to repair my rotting teeth.