What have you been up to? Me? Well just losing money and....

What have you all been up to? I see so many familiar faces here from last year when I stopped writing. I have read about the hostile takeover...I'm hoping everyone and everything here on Steemit is getting back to where it needs to be.

This past year I have been busy losing money in a little hobby I had stumbled upon. I started playing around in the stock market a bit. Mind you, this is NOT my retirement account....I've got money "invested" that does not get touched for retirement, this is just a trade account for me. I only have about $1500 or so that I "play" with. Around July of 2019 I started making some really bad moves...well let me clear that up....I first started out taking advice of others as to what they were buying and selling. That didn't work all too often. Lesson learned. Then I started to take my own "intuitions" and buy stocks that I thought were good. Apparently the stock market does not care about my "intuitions"....another lesson learned. Fast forward to December of 2019 and I had lost about 2/3 of my money.....that lesson really hurt, ouch!

So fast forward to now 5 months later, I have recovered almost all of my money except $100 and I'm starting to make some steady growth. I stopped relying on "what" others were buying and started asking "why" they were buying. I started researching why stocks go up and down and then researching even more on the overall economy. I was able to make a large amount of my money back by TVIX, which is the inverse of the DOW. I bought in mid March a couple times and was able to make a few hundred on that one. I then started looking at inverse stocks altogether. I started playing things like UGAZ and DGAZ, which are natural gas stocks. I made some money on oil when Trump tweeted that the Saudis were going to cut barrel production of oil by 10 million per day....I quickly got out. I was in a losing position on that one and when he said that, I was up about a hundred dollars and I fled the scene quite quickly.

I've been having some fun with it.....of course one always has fun when they are watching their money go up. But its not a winner each day, nor each week. There was a sad point in this that I would actually sell my stocks for only 1% or even 1/2% growth....at that time it was about a $0.20 gain. I was desperate, but I needed to see any kind of win to keep myself going. I've realized that over the past year....you don't need home runs on anything. Sometimes you just need to see that you can make contact with the ball and go up from there.

I finally started to make a few dollars and cents, but the biggest thing for me was that I finally wasn't losing money. From there I started to turn out a few "base hits", being that I would take more calculated risks...basically, risks that I was fairly sure that I could get in and out, and perhaps make a little. I still have to fight that now....as of right now, I'm sitting here with a 10% gain on DGAZ and I'm trying to bring myself to hit the "sell" button. This is where it gets tricky for me....I like to see it go up and I kinda get mesmerized by it all...then lose some of it. I did that two days ago too and now I'm sitting in a losing position for a few airline stocks. I'm still thinking they are gonna turn, late this summer, and I don't have much in it, so I'm gonna sit on my hands for now. So that's been my little hobby for the year.

What about you? Do you invest or trade? I've come to love the high of the day trading...I could watch the stocks all day, but I unfortunately do not have that luxury to do that just yet. Maybe one day I will.

So that's what I've been doing for fun....losing money and working my a$$ off on regaining it.

Well, that's about all I got for now.....let me know about your experience with trading. Any thoughts or advice?

Until next time, take care!!

-Kim