Personal Finance and Investing

If (big if) you can do a decent job getting your timing right, you can easily make 8% in a month (or 5% in 2 weeks), then sell and repeat with a different stock.

Of course you'll often get it wrong too, so knowing when to cut your losses (as well as realize your gains) is also key.

In general, if you figure the S&P 500 is essentially slightly less than 1% profit compounded monthly, if you can do double that (seems like it shouldn't be hard to do if you are disciplined about it) within 8 years you're 225% higher than buying and holding. Another 8 years and now thanks to the compounding you're 930% higher. $1,000 start in January 2010 becomes $35,000 in January 2026, as opposed to $6,000 in an S&P 500 index fund you never touched. Even accounting for higher taxes you're way better off. Besides I'll be 74 in another 16 years, so the time to buy and hold has passed me by.

Now if I can manage 3% per month, heh... be talkin real money then, which I'll probably be needing.

I've been working on my system for just about exactly 3 years now, using real money. The first half year I lost $250, the next year I lost $350, then in 2025 I made some changes (and many poor decisions as well) which led to me losing over $7,600 more. By that point I was pretty demoralized as it was nearly half my total investment of $17,000 (made incrementally over that time period). To put that into perspective, $17K is more than half my yearly income (though granted my living expenses are much lower than average, or I never could have put together that much of an investment in the first place.)

However. I switched the system around once more in December, and combined with some good luck (for once!) I made up $3,300 of it by February 28.

Then I reacted too slowly to the news tRump was attacking Iran (despite a nagging voice in my head, I did not sell off the following Monday - then began to in days after, finally dumping the last on March 9 after having lost half the $3,300 I had gained.

At that point I was too busy with tax prep work to notice the market rebounding a month later so I missed that opportunity. Still, for the first time I've seen some signs of a working system finally if I just stop ignoring my own common sense.

I just put $4,000 back in, the other $11K that remains of my original $17K is currently in a 6-month CD since I haven't learned of any better ways to safely earn yet.

The adventure continues....