Clear Trades

First, a disclaimer:

Don’t do anything that I do. I really don’t know what I’m doing. This blog exists to help me learn. I’m sharing what I do along the way to help me understand what I’m doing and learn from my mistakes (and hopefully some successes). I believe you have to put real money on the line to truly learn. Paper trading might be okay for a complete novice, but without the emotion attached to real dollars, you don’t get the full experience.

Now, a little bit about me:

I’ve always loved the stock market and investing. I first discovered it sometime around the 6th grade. I believe the first book I read on the subject was Beating the Street, by Peter Lynch. Unfortunately, I’ve never invested much real money. Most of my life, when I’ve had some disposable income, I wasn’t interested in investing at the time or I wanted to spend it on things like cars and TVs. Frankly, I’ve made a lot of dumb personal finance moves which has kept me away from the stock market. I think I’ve finally learned my lesson. I live on a budget and I’m trying to live as meagerly as possible so that I can funnel as much money into the stock market as I can and so that the amount of money I need to make will be as small as possible to make living off my investing a more realistic possibility in the future.

I still have a lot to learn. I have no formal finance education. Only learning that I’ve done on my own. I don’t really understand options, which is my next big goal — because doing something smart with that kind of leverage would really help me grow my small trading stash.

My risk tolerance is very high. For purposes of this website, consider the money I’m investing here fun money. If I lose it all I won’t be homeless or hungry. I’m willing to make risky moves to try to grow my account as quickly as possible. If I had a large sum of money I’d be happy to go much more conservative and live off of dividends, bonds, and a small number of trades. Since I’m just starting out — and I"m desperate to quit my day job and do this full-time — I’m going to be foolish at times. Don’t do what I’m doing! I’m not giving out advice. I’m just recording what I do, wether it’s smart or stupid, as a learning experience (and hopefully an entertaining read).