I thought I would take a second to ramble, although it is still somewhat financially related.

In the past week a friend of mine (we’ll call him Wade) decided he wanted to start learning how to play the stock market and he wanted yours truly to help him learn. I have no problem with this because the more the better. Best scenario he can eventually tell me what to invest in. That will save me some work.

What got him interested?

It is pretty simple. Wade is a med student, and right now he doesn’t make that much money, although he will eventually. He saw the success that I was having. On my good days I would make as much money has he would in a month, and like any good American he wanted in on that action. He also read a lot about pharmaceutical companies and wants to try and make fast cash off of it.

The problem

I am the worst teacher, coach, guru whatever you want to call it. I basically have no patients and just love to scream at people. For some reason most people don’t understand the screaming. I am also not a very good student. All through school I was never a great student. I knew the material, but I just didn’t see what the point of proofs were. Who told them their 650 step method was right? I enjoyed trying to do the least amount of things to still be successful. I learn best just by experiencing or doing it myself.

How I teach him

I just told him to go to my site. The way I learned the stock market and still do is by watching and researching things. Over time I soak in everything I have seen. Everybody has different reasons and methods for playing. They also have different guidelines to why a stock price will move. So to me the best advice to give him was to go through my site. Even if I don’t have actual textbook material, there are still stories, links, and tons of other resources available via this site. I believe you can’t teach people how to invest. You have got to develop your own system.

Some things I made sure to point out

• Develop your trading time frame: are you looking to trade positions from day to day or are you more long-term.
• Don’t become too greedy: it is best to make $1/share then losing $.05/share.
• Don’t get frustrated: if something doesn’t work, don’t get worried; see what went wrong and use it in your next trade.
• Don’t get trapped: live to trade another day.
• If its public then its too late: if a piece of news is on the front page or posted all over the TV screen, then most likely it is already too late.
• Don’t get to big-headed: Don’t think you are the greatest thing since slice bread because you made a couple good picks; you can very well lose all of that in the next trading day.
• I’m sure I missed some things: so go read my site

So we will see how his venture pans out. If he starts to make money there will be a commission check for him in the mail.