Tim's Introduction, and a post for stock market newbies

Hi community

My name is Tim, and here is my introduction to the Steemit community. There are many aspects of my life that I intend to write about. I'm a 32 year old from Toronto. I am a relatively unsuccessful actor. I am a bit of a baseball aficionado. I am a CrossFit Level One instructor. I do short contract gigs (scotch tastings, car shows, etc). And I entered the stock market back in January. Most of my posts will be about my experience in the stock market, because I think my mistakes (i.e. the moves that cost me money) were avoidable. I am still in the red, but I have gotten much better and smarter over the couple months I've been in.

I was at my girlfriend's family Christmas dinner, and her mom's partner was checking his phone. "Oh he's probably checking his stocks. He's doing really well." "I made three thousand dollars today", he said. "I'm listening", I said.

He proceeded to tell me about his experience on the stock market. He was the smart one - the one who bought into pot stocks before they were #potstocks. He got into Canopy Growth (WEED/TWMJF) when it was 2.00 per share. He got into Aurora (ACB/ACBFF) at 2.00 per share. He got into Namaste (N/NXTTF) at 0.30. Financially he was doing very well. It all looked amazing to me. I was hooked before even starting.

Being a bank, naturally CIBC took ages before opening my trading account and transferring the money. But finally, almost two weeks after my conversation with GF's mom's BF, I was up and running. I bought in (exclusively pot stocks) on January 11th. If you look, you'll see that a violent two-day pot stock correction began on January 11th. At the closing bell on January 12th, my account was down about 18%. Just to reiterate - I bought in pre-market on January 11th, and on January 12th, I was down 18%.

Now fortunately it all went back up, and I recouped most of my losses in the ensuing couple days (temporarily - as I will show you). But this leads me to a very important lesson for a stock market newbie.

RULE NUMBER ONE: It is possible to lose an awful lot of money on the stock market. This is difficult to fully comprehend. But psychologically it is incredibly difficult on one's psyche to see one's account that far in the red. It's not just the loss of money. It's the loss of confidence and the self-loathing that comes with it.

Fortunately I'm a smart guy. I didn't sell low, I held on to my buys (N, THCX, VFF, CRON), and made most of my money back pretty quickly. By the following Wednesday, my account had gone from -18% to -3%. Then came my second major mistake.

A couple weeks prior, St George's Eco-Mining (SX.CN) announced some good news; I don't remember exactly what it was. They were partnering with a blockchain company and had closed a debenture or something. Either way, the stock price went from 0.05 on November 29th to a high of 2.90 on January 12th (what is that? a 5800% return?). On January 16th, people started taking profits. It crashed from 2.90 all the way to 1.70 on the 16th. On the 17th, I looked, and saw a price of 0.92. I thought "Oh this is gonna bounce". So I made a small buy at 0.92. It bounced all the way to 1.17 before I took profits. A great buy! I made a bit of money. Yay. It closed that day at 1.01. I bought at the right time, and sold at the right time. Damn I'm a good trader, right?

Next day, I looked at the price, and saw it had dropped to 0.92 again. I thought "hell yeah! I know how this goes, I'm in again!", and this time I made a bigger buy. I walked away for maybe 15 minutes, and came back. The price had hit 0.69. Ouch. What did I say? "Hell yeah, if 0.92 was a good price, 0.69 is a GREAT price." I sold it at 0.54. It closed that day at 0.33, bounced the next day to 0.62, and it's currently trading at 0.25.

Now this was not (alas) my least profitable trade, but it is easily my least profitable DAY trade. I lost about 5% of my entire account on that one trade in about two hours. This leads to....

LESSON NUMBER TWO: Don't try and time the bottom. ESPECIALLY on small/micro cap companies. It's a fool's game. If you're right once, you're wrong three or four times. A stock can ALWAYS go lower.
LESSON NUMBER THREE: Always trade with stop losses. I'll write more about how I learned to set stop-losses in another post, but suffice it to say, always always always trade with stop losses. The CDN market doesn't accept stop losses, so it's on you to follow in detail. Both the venture exchange and the TSX do accept stop losses. If you don't know what I'm talking about, just google "stop loss".
LESSON NUMBER FOUR: Your 'hunches' and 'instincts' provide you zero value as a newbie. People spend years in school to learn this stuff. Your 'gut feeling' is a liability.

Thanks boys and girls. Hope you enjoy it. I'll have more to say next time. Please give me a follow if you like what I'm dishing out. Being a newbie I'd appreciate a resteem if you think fellow newbies might see value in this. And please leave me some comments. I love talking about this stuff.