Ten months ago, at the beginning of the pandemic and shelter-in-place orders, we began "dabbling" in the stock market. To say we were "wet behind the ears" when it came to playing the stock market was an understatement. But over months we followed some YouTube channels that explained shorts, calls, "Pump and Dump" strategies and even learned what a day trader was versus a swing trader.
Early on we lost some money (not much, but just enough to teach us valuable lessons), but quickly turned things around when we discovered our lack of trading knowledge.
After a few months of researching, checking out StockTwits and other stock market forums, we began to turn our failures around. I even did a few day trades (following the SEC guidelines) and we started seeing the "red" change to "green". Which for a stock holder is a beautiful color.
We never purchased one share of any stock without talking to each other here. We made a vow that we had to know about the company, know what they were trying to advance in the company via the stock market and had to know the last few months of candlesticks on the stock chart. (Yeah, learning about candlesticks and different patterns was a LONG learning process.)
At one point we had eight different stocks in our Ameritrade portfolio; but over a few months we sold off and had two (American Airlines- AAL- and Fisker- FSK) stocks. About a month ago FSK (an electric vehicle company) topped just over $30 a share (we owned 150 shares which we had a purchase price of 21.25 per share). We sold off and netted a nice profit of $1300 USD. That left us with AAL; which we owned 250 shares and had averaged down our price to $13.67 per share USD. About two weeks ago AAL hit a nice high of $25.00; so I set up a limit sell order and when it hit 25.01 all 250 shares were sold. Netting us another HUGE profit of over $2800/USD.
Our initial investment of $5k USD turned around and we walked away with about an 80% profit. We were done with the stock market. We learned more when the Gamestop (GME) fiasco happened and saw just how the market could be manipulated and that's when we decided to take ourselves, and our money, out of it.
Next we turned our sights on precious metals, soon to be followed with more investing into cryptocurrencies.
I already had some Bitcoin sitting in my coinbase wallet, but hubby wanted to diversify while accumulating more. But I had set my sights on precious metals.
I had set up an account with JM Bullion and began digging out some old junk silver we had collected and inherited from relatives who had passed away many years ago. I even took some of the junk coins (mostly silver dollars dating back to the the 1930s) to a pawn shop coin person. While the value wasn't what I was hoping, they were still more valuable than the $1/USD they had been assigned to back then. Want to know what the true price of silver and gold are/or should be today? Check out the US Debt Clock Be ready to see some WILD numbers here!
So we purchased some 0.999% Silver coins and gold coins to add to our junk silver coins. I purchased a nice holder for the coins to be in a capsule and we have them hidden quite well. We are in search of a combination gun safe right now. We've narrowed it down to three and will be shopping for it this weekend.
And the thing is, this entire process began in June of 2020, when we got our income tax refund and the first US stimulus payment. That was what we opened our Ameritrade stock market account with. Then we added the second stimulus payment in December 2020 to the mix. When hubby got his profit share from his employer that was also added. We never had one out-of-pocket expense to get this entire "domino effect" of diversifying our investments started. Our third and final stimulus payment (in February or March) went to purchasing more cryptocurrency and some of the precious metals.
Whereas five months ago I only had HIVE tokens (and I think there are still some steem tokens in that old account which I'll have to figure out what to do with) and a little "chunk" of BTC, we now have more BTC and many Ethereum coins in our wallet. The shopping spree has ended and we are going to ride out "whatever comes our way" in regards to the crypto market as well as the precious metal's prices.