HI

[jlcnuke]

Hi all .
I'm an 32yr old ex-navy nuclear operator now working in consulting for the power industry. I started doing practice investing in the early 90's and have been doing them off and on since then. Over the last year I've concentrated on it a lot more and finally had enough money to start doing my own trades. For reference I've been averaging ~25%/month on the practice investing so that convinced me that I'm either really lucky or my methods have been working.

For my real money acct I decided to start small (in case I'm wrong about
how well I do). I'm using Scottrade at the moment and fairly pleased with it. It is annoying that they don't have an easy access to a summary of todays %change/gains/losses when free practice investment sites do but maybe that's included with the Scottrade Elite.

I'm using strictly cash trades for now, don't like the idea of trading on margin. Though when I start having more free time and add capital I may work in some day trading so I guess I'll have to limit how often I do that just to avoid being labeled a PDT.

Been reading alot of information/threads lately and very glad I found this site

[Albert0373]

Glad to have you on board!

What was your strategy in your practice investing that resulted in the 25% return? Did you diversify?

And for Scottrade, have you fiddled around with the Gainskeeper link on the website?

[jlcnuke]

My strategy has been two-fold. First part of my strategy is picking stocks to research. That consists of looking at the overall economic trend, in this case it being a recession where people and companies are looking to save (this is what I call my common sense initial screening). Then I look at companies I think might do well in various sectors.

That led me to companies specializing in low/middle cost necessities such as ctrn and wmt among others. Since my personal experience is in the power industry doing consulting for multiple companies I also look at energy stocks.

I try to maintain 10-12 stocks and have avoided day trading since I don't really have the time while working my full time job.

Gainskeeper would be great if it did real time updates instead of only giving daily summaries. Unless there's something on it I've missed.

[Albert0373]

Ah sorry, forgot to check back here.

Great to see you have a well thought out strategy beforehand, seems like you're looking for stable companies that'll perform well for the long term. Plenty of ripe fruit to be picked around at this time!

Check out this thread from a seasoned veteran around here: http://www.onlinetradersforum.com/showthread.php?t=4382

[Gzapper]

step 1. grow show more up top low step 2. slide measure for one more zookeeper step 3. lay "vesticular" machinery in utter pie for uncle mark to make chimmichangas promptly after flying kites in the low lands of bupty

[aiki14]

Originally Posted by Gzapper

step 1. grow show more up top low step 2. slide measure for one more zookeeper step 3. lay "vesticular" machinery in utter pie for uncle mark to make chimmichangas promptly after flying kites in the low lands of bupty

Zap, this guy is just starting out, giving him this level of advanced trading strategy is only going to be confusing. Just my opinion of course.

[jlcnuke]

Changed my mind this week about the margin account. I'm still not planning on using the margin, but T+3 really sucks so had to switch my account over to a margin account.

Was fun when the first trailing stop hit and sold giving me a margin call until I called the broker. Processing hadn't switched my account type over so it didn't see any margin equity yet but all is good now

No more T+3 to deal with woohoo!