A Nagging Interest

For some time, I have had a nagging interest to start a blog about both learning and my experiences investing; being admitted to the Haas School of Business at the University of California, Berkeley finally provided the necessary motivation for me to actually start this blog.

The main goals of this blog are for everyone, including myself, to become better at investing. I only have a handful of self-taught years in investing, mostly trading securities in the stock market. To share my brief history to date, I first started with buying mutual funds, largely being an "hands off" investor.

With mutual funds, the investor pays a fee, usually a small proportion of invested assets. This fee is paid to a manager, or group of managers, who decides how to invest the money imparted to him/her. The advantage to the investor is that this provides some security against volatility in the market. The disadvantage is that the returns of the fund tend to be smaller to the investor due to the fee being paid to the manager. This allows the investor to, by-and-large, remain with their "head in the sand", forgoing the time needed checking the performance of your own portfolio on a regular basis. That being said, there is a huge disparity of mutual funds, as they have become a popular retail security, and most are very different from one an other. There are many resources on the Internet devoted to researching mutual funds. The particular one that I used is MorningStar (http://www.morningstar.com/).

After spending about a year becoming comfortable with mutual funds, I started branching out into buying stock in actual companies. In my early days, I started buying stock in companies that I knew. This provides a good basis as, if you know the company, you have done some market research already. This is still where I am, gradually increasing the volume of trades, which at this point stands at about 1000 trades a year. My next goals are to become comfortable with trading options, both calls and puts, and fixed income securities, such as bonds.

It is my hope that both myself and any potential readers can become more knowledgeable investors and have some fun along the way!