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Wednesday, March 18, 2009

My FIRST Trade

After winning 2 paper stock trading competitions in 1996 and 1997 while in University confidence was sky high walking around the University Of Portland campus. In 1998 i worked part-time in the computer lab and managed to save $500 and opened a Scottrade account. I was SO excited to start my trading journey.
Recall the 1996-1998 time frame, the mind boggling and until this day the MOST amazing bubble i have ever seen. Cab drivers and college students were increasing their accounts by 100-500% and everyone who bot AMZN, JDSU, QCOM and AOl thought they were market experts. I remember it very vividly, the wealth creation was dreamlike, everybody wanted to trade and everybody made money. You could not go wrong! Just BUY TECH! Henry Blodget and Mary Meeker(poster boy and girl analysts who kept the dream alive with outrageous high price targets).
So the journey began after i opened my little scottrade account and back then IPOs were the talk of town. So i decided to buy $500 worth of TheGlobe.com in November 1998. The pricing was at $10(if i recall right) and being the rookie that i was i thought that i would get that price buying at the open of trading on IPO debut(shows how little i knew)....WRONG!!!! The stock opened in the $80 range(if i recall right) and i remeber saying "shit! i knew the puppy is gonna sky rocket, i want in!" So i placed a market order and watched the stock drop about 15% after i bot it. YIKES!!! I got the fuck out the next day i believe.
That was my first trade ever and until this day i will never forget it. I used to trade in between classes in the computer lab. LOL! Back then the market was forgiving. I learned my lesson and never traded IPOs ever again. I did however end up buying the Internet high flyers AOl, AMZN, JDSU etc and my account grew to $2600 and i closed the account and went on to buy lots of beer and new gear. LOL!! Opened my second account a few months later.

How far i have come since that trade....it's almost surreal that i am still in the trading game after all these years and man-o-man do i have some war stories. There must have been hundreds of thousands of trades after that one.

That's my first trade, thanks for reading.

3 comments:

DT said...

The globe appears to be an idea that was eventually done successfully by the likes of Xanga, Myspace and now Facebook.

I wish I could remember my first (reckless) trade. I started June '07 and little could I know what was to come. Perspective - don't leave home without it.

Stewie said...

yea, theglobe.com is lost somewhere in history now.

Anonymous said...

Hi, stewie. I came back to your blog after many months. glad to see you are doing well.

I remember how I got started, I used to swingtrade chicos (chs) I think it was chcs then.

the market was forgiving for those in tech, but most stocks were doing nothing at least in early 1999 or 98.

I got around to tech during hte bear market and made a mess. I was so naive.

thanks

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