(no subject)

[cblj_backup]

So, I decided I wanted to learn more about the stock market.

Well, it's always struck me as a terribly irrational way to run an economy, but if I'm going to dislike it I should understand why. And really the only way I learn is by doing, so I asked Nakki about it, since I knew she did a little investing, and she pointed me to the RobinHood app, which lets you buy and sell stock in realtime for no fee.

I threw fifty bucks in and built a portfolio, just to kind of see what’s what, and today I made my first sale -- I bought Grubhub at $18 in late January and just sold it for $25. Probably I shouldn't have sold, but the whole thing's an experiment, not a wealth-building exercise, and seven dollars' profit is a bonus.

Plus it freed up just enough cash to buy into Fitbit. :D We'll see how well my picks continue....

Comments

[sherylyn]

One of my favorite stock market stories ever came from a "business computer science" prof I had a million years ago in under grad (the very "title" of his degree/field should give you an idea of how long ago this was!!). When *he* was in undergrad (in the '50s), one of the assignments in a class was that they were supposed to pretend to do some stock trading by picking a handful of stocks and tracking them, etc., as if they'd literally invested. So after the semester, when he went home to the farm (literally) for Christmas break, he asked his dad for something like $1000 to invest in a stock that he reallllly thought was going to actually go somewhere, from what he'd been studying for that class assignment. I *think* his dad talked him into doing something like buying a piece of land or something, instead, b/c it was supposed to be a "safer" investment. I was in his class in the early '80s. Wanna guess what stock he wanted to buy, way back when??

IBM.

Yeah.

Not exactly the same now as it once was, perhaps, but still... can you imagine what that stock would've been worth by the '80s???!! o.O

[copperbadge.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I was doing a report on one of the founders of an international biotech firm last week, and stock in the firm was at $3 in the early 90s. It now trades at $150 or thereabouts. *sighs*

[sherylyn]

Yeah, those types of scenarios are kinda mind-blowing, but it sure makes you wonder what some of today's stocks might do eventually!!