What it is.

It's Good Friday and the markets are closed, so why not start a blog about what I'm doing with what scant discretionary income I have. Why not, indeed.
My name is Christopher Eric Orvieto Ashley (or just Chris) and I am a 39 year old MBA student at a Willamette University in Oregon. I am not now, nor have I ever been a stock broker, analyst, or employed in any way in high finance.
Our economy is in the pits. But just as that's true it's also true that it's an excellent time to buy stuff, like stocks. Once powerful blue chips are penny stocks, so why not snap them up?
Back on March 10th Ben Bernanke stated that no more big banks would be allowed to fail. I read that as a signal not to be afraid to buy up some bank stocks. No more would investor's money disappear when the next Lehman Brothers sank to the bottom of the sea. No! US Taxpayer dollars will shore up those lofty beasts! My tax dollars. So, I'm gonna try and earn it back by becoming a swing trader.

What do I mean by "swing trader"? No, I'm not swapping my portfolio with other traders on drunken Saturday nights. What my strategy is is to take advantage of short term (generally less than a week) up swings in specific stocks. Buy low, sell high. Basic stock trading 101. So how's it going so far?

On March 11th I put $150 into my online brokerage and bought 90 shares of Citibank (NYSE:C) at $1.53. I sat on that until March 18th when I sold all the shares at $3.145. My first score! Unfortunately I was flat broke at that moment and instead of reinvesting the gains I put them in my wallet. But I kept a little more than my origional seed money and with that on March 24 I bought 7 shares at $20.69 of Finacial Bear 3X Shares (NYSE:FAZ) which is a fund that seeks daily results of 300% of the inverse of the financial market. I thought that the little rally had just happened would sink back down and.... I was wrong. My first loss! I sold the FAZ shares on April 3rd at $17.84. The Bank of Ireland (NYSE:IRE) was showing some explosive growth at this time (I had some shares in my IRA) so I tried to jump on that buying 23 shares at $4.38. It kinda stalled so I got out at $4.54 and once again got on the Citibank band wagon snapping up 30 shares at $2.95 on April 9th. And that's where I am now.

So, at the close yesterday, the Fun Fund looks like
C Citigroup $3.04 30.0000 $91.20

That means I'm down $58.80 from my origional seed. Which means I have two immediate goals:

1) Find another discount broker. My current broker charges $9.95 per trade, which means that I don't even break even until a stock is up $19.90 over it's starting position. That's not going to work for me.
2) Get the Fun Fund back up to $150 in as short a period as I can.

What it is is what it is.