Shhh! Yes I know, putting up savings while no income is coming in and in an incredibly complex and volatile investment such as stocks doesn't sound so smart. But who ever said I do things in a smart way. Remember my almost-buy of Bitcoin a few months ago?
In case you forgot, I had some technical difficulties in getting my ID uploaded in order to open my cryptocurrency trading account and never got to actually buy BTC when I wanted. And, as it turns out that was a good thing since I wanted to buy when it was trading at around $17,455 but within hours, it had dropped some $1,000. Now I was only planning to by just a tiny fraction of a bitcoin for $100 so it wouldn't have been the end of the world, but still. A loss is a loss. (BTW, just checked...it's currently at $8,373...so, um, yea. It would have been a BAD 52% loss had I bought and held to now.)
Robinhood is an app for iPhone or Android that let's you place trades on stocks in real-time without fees. I downloaded this app and tried to create an account a while back (yes, when I still had a job) but again, perhaps due to technical difficulties with my ID? IDK, they didn't say, I had gotten an email saying I wouldn't be able to open an account at this time. So I deleted the app and shrugged it off. No big, I wasn't planning on doing a lot of stock buying, I mainly wanted the free stock that was promised by signing up using the reference code from one of the financial guru channels I watch regularly on YouTube.
But last week, they emailed me and said my account had been approved and was ready for me to fund. They also said my free stock was waiting for me to claim it. Sure enough, I re-downloaded the app on my phone and the account was open and I had a single share of Groupon (GRPN) sitting there priced, at the time I viewed it, at $4.82. Woo hoo! But, it was put into my account last Tuesday when it was $5.16. Awww :(
I waited to link my checking account to the Robinhood account until today. I figured...What the heck! The markets are up today and I figure I have some liquid cash to burn. Well, let's hope not actually burn, I mean, I do want to make money, but on the other hand, since the trades are live and I can pull out at anytime (although there was some fine print they had about daytrading) I can see how well I can reshuffle my portfolio if individual stocks look to be heading for a dive. I mean, how hard can this be? Buy low, sell high. Couldn't be any easier than that, right?
I threw $500 into the account and so far I've bought about $460 of stocks. Of course, since I have no fucking idea what I'm doing, the stocks I chose were practically the same as, back in my youth, when I used to open up the market pages of the newspaper, close my eyes, twirl my finger and stab it onto the page randomly. Believe it or not, I actually had a pretty good run with that method back in the day. Of course, that was imaginary speculation since I just tracked the stock for a month or so and never actually bought anything.
Here are the screenshots of my Wall Street Wizardry at work. As I was typing this at exactly 4:00 PM, the app made a sound like the familiar closing bell on the trading floor in New York. Aww, how cute.
(These are screen caps from my phone, of course. Can I say what a fucking chore it is to do a screen cap and then to convert to a jpeg? I must be doing something wrong.)
So, right at the top you can see, I ended the trading day at $505.58 from an initial session of buys stating at 12:06 PM. In about four hours I made $5.58! Bazzinga! Look out Warren Buffet, here I come!
The second screen cap shows the closing prices of the stock I own (How cool is it to say that?...The STOCK I OWN!) These amounts are respective of the full day of trading in factoring the red or green coloring. Let's see in this breakdown how I did seeing as I jumped in around lunchtime.
The list represents the name of the stock, the time I bought it at what price, the number of shares, the closing time and price, gain/loss amount/share times total shares and total closing amount:
GoPro (GPRO), 12:06 @ $5.46, 10 shares, $5.46, EVEN, $54.46
Groupon (GRPN), 12:08 @ $4.74, 10 shares, $4.80, GAIN $0.06 x 10 = + $0.60, $48.00
Disney (DIS), 12:10 @ $103.98, 1 share, $104.06, GAIN $0.08 x 1 = + $0.08, $104.06
Symantec (SYMC), 12:12 @ $21.63, 5 shares, $21.59, LOSS $0.04 x 5 = - $0.20, $107.95
Sketchers (SKX), 1:46 @ $30.51, 3 shares, $30.46, LOSS $0.05 x 3 = - $0.15, $91.38
FitBit (FIT), 1:48 @ $5.21, 10 shares, $5.25, GAIN $0.04 x 10 = + $0.40, $52.50
Groupon (GRPN), 5/15/18 @ $0.00 (FREE) (Value $5.16), 1 share, $4.80, GAIN $4.80 x 1 = + $4.80, $4.80
458.35 stock I bought, closing total
4.80 free from Robinhood
42.29 in cash reserve
GRAND TOTAL of MY TRADES for TODAY! (Not counting the freebie)...............I MADE 64 CENTS!!!
The amount of time it took for me to either chose a stock from the "actives" ticker on the app (GoPro, Disney and FitBit) or add to the free stock to keep it company (Groupon) or pine romantically for the last time I held "stock" when I worked there (options that didn't get the chance to vet) (Symantec) or to go with a recommend from one of those "Hot Stocks to Buy" sites (Sketchers) equals about 2 hours so I figure I made 32 cents an hour. Heck, that's bank in Bangladesh, son!
I think I'll cash out of this racket real soon.
EDIT: So in doing the tally above again, for some reason I was getting two differing figures. I added all the totals as displayed and the amount was as stated above, but if I subtracted from the total portfolio amount as shown in the top screen cap, there was a difference of 14 cents in my favor. Huh? So, I went back to the order execution emails and the wording said the order was executed at an "average" price of x. I looked that term up and there's a whole system of time and/or weighted average prices using a shitload of fucking math which I hate so I have no clue what it all means...other than this: I need to get out of this and run. Too Mathy McMathface for me! It sounds like witchcraft!