Over the Counter

After leaving the house before the markets opened this morning to attend the 112th US Open, I was not able to participate in regular trading hours. I had a blast at the Open thanks to my good friend Jon Kretchmer. It was my first time attending a pro golf event, and the highlight was seeing Tiger Woods play the back 9 of the Olympic Club in San Francisco. His talent is awe-inspiring and it was even more amazing seeing the 500+ people following him around on a quiet Monday of practice.

Returning home, I grabbed the mail and checked the markets. One of my routines is looking at the stocks that are down with the biggest percentage. A couple caught my eye, but the biggest loser was EnergySolutions, Inc. (ES), which was down $1.62 and more than 54% on a volume of almost 36 times its 3 month average. I think that it might be a good stock to buy because it is potentially oversold, so I put in my first after-hours trade with Merrill Lynch. I'm betting that it is in fact oversold and will rebound when trading resumes tomorrow morning.

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!