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?
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Nice returns. My worst returns have come from trading illiquid stocks. My worst loss was pretty close to 100%, but I was young and stupid.
haha.. well im sure it was a great learning experience
That’s awesome. I don’t know if I have the gut to invest like that. My way is slow and steady using low expense ETFs & Mutual Funds, Asset Allocation, and yearly reallocation. A bit boring, but it allowed me to beat the S&P500 for the past 6, almost 7 years.
Yeah it took me some time to finally get up the courage to just put my money out there, but just starting was probably the hardest part.
6/7 is pretty good, I can only hope I will have run like that.
Congrats! I bought AAPL last August at 68. Sold it this September when it dropped down to 113 early in the day while the Dow was down 300 (wound up closing just slightly down on the day). This was my best and worst investment, because if I would have held on, I would have tripled my initial investment in just a few more weeks.
steve – yeah those are always hard in my opinion because you know you made money, but on the other hand you could of made so much more.. but its better to be safe then sorry.. nice job
Congratulations. I’m up around 18% for the year, unfortunately took a hit last Friday of about 4%. I hope you sold all those stocks before the recent sell off because it seems like you were really heavy in the Tech sector.