Mar 14, 2009

When it comes to investing, I'm fucking clueless.

But that doesn't stop me from doing it. At 25, I have at least 35 years until retirement. So I just have to believe that over time, the markets will go up.

Regardless, when it comes down to picking stocks and ETFs, I'm shooting blind. And maybe that's best. The market rallied a bit this week. My new thing is to try to invest heavily on the weeks when news is all doom and gloom, and hold back weeks that it picks up. Not that I'm really trying to "time the market" -- I invest monthly, but I do try to guess at the best spot per month to put in my money. I've got it on auto pilot at Sharebuilder, and it only invests on Tuesdays, but I don't put money in on Monday until I know we're off to a bad week.

And that's kind of working out. For now. My Sharebuilder account (which is my "fun" investing account to see if I can beat the market) is now down "just" 30.30% Buying stocks and ETFs the last two months has helped -- the only way I'm going to make back the money is to invest when the market is doing its shittiest, and hope that it goes up. I'm just worried I'm too diversified. But I do that because I don't know what I'm doing.

I own 11 different stocks/ETFs in my Sharebuilder account. Not sure if that's too much or too little. I need to stop getting excited about different ETFs and stocks, putting $100 into them and then moving on. It's time to really hone in on my better performing stocks and invest in them. My ETFs are actually the worst performing right now, except for maybe Whole Foods. But then again they go up and down and up and down, so who knows.

My gains and losses sheet on Sharebuilder is all red except IHI - the medical devices ETF I just purched a small amount of two weeks ago. That's up $8. It's refreshing to see something green on that page.

The account has lost $931.03 to date. The more I invest now, the more likely that in 35 years I won't remember how scary it was to lose that much money that fast. (Not counting the $7000 that my Vanguard accounts are down, give or take a few hundred on the given day.)

I wish I had more appetite for risk... because a year ago I would have shorted the market and today I'd put more money in. But I'm, you know, only able to stomach $10k losses a year at my current payrate. Maybe more next year.



3 comments:

Anonymous said...

I don't even have the guts to have a fun investing account, so you're much less risk averse than I am!

Slinky said...

I know enough to know not to invest in individual stocks until I know what all those crazy numbers mean. :) So instead, I just have a rather aggressive mutual/index fund portfolio.

Anonymous said...

LOL. I love the title of this post!
I'm approaching 40 and I'm still fairly clueless.
It's a process that just takes time and it never ends.

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