Let me spell it out, I am going to start each post talking a bit about the innocuous title I use before I dive into the meat of the issue. Done. At work today, Downtown L.A., in a renovated office building I heard some chatter about some sort of party in the building. I dismissed this until the end of the day when I was getting ready to blast off and I cruised by the windows in the hallway looking down on the courtyard in the center of the building. Below me were a couple of under-lit plexiglass bar tables, a couple of nice couches, and some other furniture that would be at home at the Standard.

pics……..

They set up on the under the hoop which I used to hit up every now and again before they removed the balls for some reason. Haters. They had sectioned off an entire area next to the air handler for food prep. It looked serious. Seriously good that is. The point of this is that our office was not invited, when I left work I saw an informative sign indicating this was a party for investors. Oh well, I will be there someday.

What this leads to is my recent ventures into the wild world of stock trading. I think what started the series of events ending in me invested in three companies was the engineering economics class mentioned in the last post. The professor is interesting enough, but with graduation looming I have been thinking about the real world prospect of having money to invest. After about a week of watching CNBC I made the decision to get online and get my hands dirty in the dirtiest of all places. I signed up for an etrade account, probably not the wisest decision since the amount the charge per trade is equivalent to anal rape. I justified this to Raymond by saying I wouldn’t be making that many trades so the difference wouldn’t matter in the long term. So I set up the account and transfered a couple hundred big ones from my bank account, roughly equivalent to my tax refund (this was also a justification).

After what seemed like an excruciating five business days of waiting for my transfer to go through I had something to work with. After poking around looking at companies that interested me, or that I heard something about on CNBC I had a bunch of stocks in a watch list. Then I saw it, etrade’s own stock [ETFC] was in a serious depression due to a ton of exposure on bad loans. Thanks defaulting deadbeats. At $4.60 a share it seemed like a great pickup that I could have a fair amount of shares so I could practice maneuverability. I picked up 20 shares and the next day saw the stock push towards $5 a share. Booyah. Everyone in the market was winning big, then they wanted to get paid (who doesn’t?) and there was a massive sell off everywhere and [ETFC] dropped down past what I paid. WTF. I guess this is how it goes, if I had serious money invested I think I would die from the stress. In crisis there is always opportunity, and sensing this I saw that the gold stock I was watching Yamana Gold [AUY] had been hit hard by the sell off and a drop in gold prices. After waking up early before weight training class to watch the price I made the foolish decision to pick up 10 shares at $15.08. By the end of the day it had dropped down to around $14.50. Weak. This was annoying, but I trusted the analysis and earning reports and I decided that I am in it to win it and will stick it out. Everyone needs gold right? After a slow day yesterday my second transfer came through, this time it was the savings I had taken out of every pay check to save for after school. Now was the time to put it to work right? The one stock I had been watching since I started this madness was Honda [HMC]. With rock solid management and undervalued shares Honda was my dream girl to grow old with. When I started watching the big H it was at $29.50, it had gone up steadily then became a vitcim of the sell off and underwhelming earnings. Added to this the extremely negative response to the MMC (Mid Model Cycle) refresh of the RL, which I think looks fairly badass.

Again haters. The point being [HMC] dropped to $29.50 close to a 12 month low, this was it and after waiting for the price to be around what I saw as the lowest I picked up 10 shares. Whew I did it. Hopefully this will pay for my kids college (go FCX). At the end of today all my stocks were up slightly, with [ETFC] seeming to gain back some of the thunder it had earlier with a near %5 gain. I can see how people can be obsessed with this and also how the can kill themselves over it. I am just waiting for the moment I can hand this over to a broker. For now I will continue to walk the razor’s edge and feel the fire on my face.