54% gain in one month!

Stock purchases update: I sold my ford stock on 3-18-09 to raise the cash to pay my IRS bill. After paying that sizable bill I had $18,600 left over in my brokerage account, on 3-25-09 I re-purchased various stocks with that money. Today 4-23-09 my brokerage account balance is $28,174.

 Wow you say, I want to do that, a 54% gain in one month.

Note: I am playing, and this type of investing is more akin to gambling. Monday, my portfolio (which changes every few days) dropped $2,400 in value, and Tuesday gained it back. If you can not sleep at night with 20% swings don't play this game.

I buy stocks priced at under $10.00 that are recommended by various authors. To locate the stocks I read Forbes magazine, the motley fool on line, and Dennis Slothowers newsletter. And I listen to public radio's nightly business report. For example, PBS news said that Bank of America stock was down 25% on Monday, On Tuesday morning it was down another 12%, so I bought 325 shares, (all the cash I had in my brokerage account) @ $7.09 today BAC is $8.26 that is a 17% gain in three days.

Stop loss orders will help protect your wins, but with wide swings stop losses orders have less value.

For example: I stop lossed out of java (Sun Micro) at a slight loss, and the next day it went up $2.00 that stop-loss cost me a $400 gain (Sun merged with Oracle).

If you have extra money, and you like to take risk, and you want the thrills, play with stocks. One more thing, I am paying cash and not doing any fancy trades or margin buying (credit buys). I know I could be doing all kinds of fancy trades, but I am already playing above my pay grade.