Over 40% in under 6 months!

Thanks to EMC’s gain and Mircosoft’s after hour hooray, I have not just beaten my goal of 20% in 6 months, I have doubled that and more, to receive a 40% return in a little less then 5 months and barely any work. The stocks involved throughout this run included: HAL, MSFT, PALM, INTC, LVLT, EMC, CSCO, T, and JAVA.

It all started back in June, when I decided to stop playing games with small money and mutual funds, and finally start to invest a real juicy amount of money. Like I have said many times, I am not an active trader, and only make my trades probably once a month and that still hasn’t changed. So before I started my account, I had made a goal to get 20% return by six months, which I thought was a pretty lofty goal considering I had barely made anything before this time.

How I got there

First half: When I first opened my new TDAmeritrade account I had received free trades for 60 days, so right out the gate I took part in more trading activity then I normally would. During these 60 days at one point or another I was invested in HAL, MSFT, T, LVLT (which I quickly got rid of), PALM, and INTC. By the end of the free trade time frame (60 days) I had already reached near 20%. At that time I was feeling pretty good about myself. Anything I invested in turned to gold (excluding LVLT); however, like most of us remember, the end of July bought some bad times. The stock market started to go down, and in turn I started to lose a good amount of money. The most being while I was on vacation. I left one day before the market started to go down. This of course set me back.

Second half: Suddenly technology started to be the “safe” place to invest, and I thought I should invest some (turned out to be most if not all) of money into the tech sector. During this time, stocks I had invested in were HAL, MSFT, CSCO, EMC, and JAVA. This half turned out to be my most profitable. I basically just rode the success of these companies and it all culminated in today’s rising of EMC and MSFT (which I recommended last week Potential Stock Buys – DIS, MSFT, KO; Sign up here to receive my posts in your email or favorite RSS reader and don’t miss the next great buy).

What are some of the great or even horrible returns you have had over time?