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Stock Market Fun

Stock Market Fun

Edison Stock TickerIn October I decided to invest a little bit of money in the stock market. Not a lot of money, mind you, but some. I did so with full willingness to lose every dime, which seems to me to be the only reasonable approach to gambling. And buying stocks, if nothing else, is gambling.

I have no special inside knowledge of businesses (to say the least). I don’t subscribe to any magazines or anything. I’ve certainly had no formal training in the matter. (A P/E ratio? What’s that?) I just approached it all as an intellectual problem and had fun.

As of a few minutes ago my holdings are up 4.3% overall — it’s more than that on paper, but when you take out the trading fees and such, that brings it down — which is a good investment at any time but especially pleasant right now. My biggest single holding is up about 50%, in fact.

On the downside, I do think I jumped in too early. I highlighted four stocks I was interested in buying last week, contemplating selling out of one of my current stocks to pick at least one of them up (investing more money isn’t quite an option right now). All four are up since then. Three of them have the following gains so far today: 19.89%, 15.79% and 13.81%. And, of course, I didn’t buy ’em. Drat.

All of which is to serve as a fair warning to the world that the stock market will plunge momentarily. My bad.

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