Stock Gamble Comments

Lots of good comments on the Stock Gamble update.

I agree that buying/selling stock in short term moves is not for most people. Frankly, it is not for me.

But, this is something that Mr. Sam is interested in doing, he is using a small amount of money, he is researching, tracking and has a plan. So I support the experiment, because I support Mr. Sam. I also recognize that Mr. Sam's plan is a gamble and I'm prepared for him to lose the full $5,000 allocated to him. But, I feel that it is a worthy gamble because I want Mr. Sam to be more engaged and involved in our personal finances.

I also agree that it is very difficult, especially for a small investor to "time" the market, but that doesn't mean that someone can't find and undervalued stock, buy it and set up a limit order for when it hits a certain value. If you do that enough times, rolling profits in from prior buys it is possible to make money.

I think the issue of when to sell a stock is interesting and one I've been researching and plan to post on soon.

Retirement Monies

In January 2010 we had $318,424 in our retirement accounts, 401K/IRA. I just updated our networthiq.com profile and we have $421,849 (not including the small trading account). More than a $100,000 increase, mostly due to market returns.

But, looking backwards, we still have not recovered to the asset levels of mid 2008 (pre-crash). During the summer of 2008 we had $1.6 MM in assets, winter 2010 we have $1.5 MM in assets. Overall net worth is in the same range @$950,000. So, two years (of hard work) later, we are just about in the same spot.

Stock Gamble Update

Well Mr. Sam sold our stock.

• He bought the stock on 9/2 and spent $4992 (he had a budget of $5000).
• He sold the stock on 12/3 at $5868.
• Gross profit of $876, he has calculated a $525 net profit or an 11% return over 90 days.

His next move is to take the budget, plus profit and purchase two stocks in the next couple of weeks. He is already researching his next purchases.