Hello, my name is Glen and this is my very first blog. I have been a part of the personal investing world for about 3 years now. I can honestly say that I have made many mistakes and have learned many lessons along the way. I truly made the majority of my mistakes before I actually started to try to learn about investing. I originally thought to myself “oh man, this is so easy. All you have to do is just buy and sell stocks and you make money, any idiot can do this”. Man was I wrong.
Learning things the hard way cost me money and time. A few lessons I had to learn the hard way was that just because a stock on the TSX was 0.30 cents 10 years ago doesn’t mean that it cannot go back to that price. Well buying a stock at 0.07 cents and having it go to 0.005 will help you learn that the hard way. It is very hard to sell a stock for 0.005 or even 0.01. Sometimes you just need to cut your losses and call it quits.
I also learned about patience. I once held Advanced Micro Devices $AMD on the nasdaq at $12 US a share. I sold it at $13 a share and thought to myself “big gains”. Little did I know that it would get to almost $60 US a year and a half later. I did not know what I had and I was only thinking short term gains. A friend once told me “long term pains, long term gains”. That is so very true. I switched my mentality and the way I invest from thinking about the short to thinking long term. It has payed off dividends (pun intended).
I understand that sometimes you need to learn from your own mistakes. I know that I certainly have but I wish I would have tried to be a little more proactive. Since I have started investing I have read MANY books, listened to MANY podcasts and even taken a personal investing course through Athabasca University. I wish I would have take that course years ago before I started investing. I would have been able to set myself up for success(which is probably one of my favorite terms) in the investing world.
I wanted to start this blog to try to help people go in the right direction when they first start to invest. There are SO many resources out there and great tools to help you become a better and smarter investor. There are many different forms of investing ie. day trading, swing trading and long term investing. I would very much suggest doing some research into which style of investing suites you the best. I have tried all 3 and for me, long term investing suites me the best. In this blog I hope to help get you access to the proper resources and tools you need to make yourself a better investor.
I plan to update my blog weekly. I will be posting my personal portfolio which is 80% Canadian securities and 20% US but I wont be saying how much I have invested or how many shares I have in said companies. I like to get a little bit of US exposure because I feel that they tend to have much better growth companies in their respective sectors than in Canadian sectors. But I mainly invest in Canada because there are no exchange fees involved which saves me money. I will also be posting a top 20 stocks that I follow the closest that are my potential next buys. I like to diversify and always try to grow my portfolio in the best way that I can. I hope you enjoy my blog please feel free to let me know how you do or do not enjoy it (I don’t mind a little constructive criticism).
Thank you for reading all of this and I hope we can all be better Investors for our own future.
Outsider Trading 