Stock Trading

I've always been curious about stock trading. In the back of my mind over the years I thought it would be cool to start to learn about the stock market. In high school I had an economics class where we did paper trading for a few weeks. Paper trading is where you buy and sell stocks virtually by looking at stock prices and writing down your purchases and sales. So it's like trading in the stock market but with fake money so there's no real risk involved.

I finally found a podcast and an app and I've started "paper trading" in the app with $20,000 of fake money. At first I got lucky and make over $300 over the course of a couple weeks. Then I lost it all and more by keeping a ton of shares of Yahoo. I kept waiting for it to climb above my purchase price again but it never happened. Eventually I cut my loses and sold off all my shares.

Since then I've just now made all my money back plus about $20. I did more research and learned about different patterns to look for in stock charts to try and guess if they're going to rise or fall. It's worked well. Now instead of buying stocks and then selling them days later I spend just a few minutes combing through stock charts, finding some that look like they're about to go up or continue to go up, and buying them. Then I wait for them to go up which often happens right away, and I sell them off. All of this happens within a few minutes and I usually only make a few bucks. So I'm day trading now instead of swing trading. A lot can happen to a stock overnight and I'm not willing to let my stocks take a plunge as I sleep. I'd rather look at a five minute window and get in low and sell off high. 

A few times I've made more than a few bucks at around $40 and one time I made over $400 in a few minutes. There's also many times where I lose money too, but I'm learning to just dump those before they lose big and get the money I can back to put into another trade. I still barely know what I'm doing and it's all with fake money, but I'm having a blast and I'm hoping that after I've been doing it for a few years with fake money that I'll know what I'm doing and I can start to trade real stocks.

Do you trade stocks? Are you interested in the stock market? It's not something that really relates to fiction, writing, or audiobooks but it is kind of like the physical trading that takes place in Science Fiction novels with cargo vessels :) Also, if you are interested, here's the podcast I love. It's called The Trading Podcast with Rob Booker and they just released their 300th episode! Thanks for stopping by.