Playing the Stocks

The world stocks plummetted like crazy over the last few months and only in the last few weeks it has shown some recovery. Normally, see these stock figures and don't give it a second thought. Lately thought, I have been keeping a much closer eye. I know my 401k is affected, but I'm not going to retire anytime soon, so I know my stocks will make a recovery and leave it as it is. I did make an adjustment to my 201k just a little over a year ago - I changed it to go from aggresive to conservative. It was around February, the Dow Jones has been going down the last few months and there were rumors there was going to be a big crash. Sure enough, there was 300 point loss in the Dow a couple days later. I kept it at conservtive while stocks slowly went down. Many blamed the cost for high gas prices, which they were to some extent. Anyway, the stocks started to slowly recover and I started thinking I should change it back to the aggressive plan - lucky for me, I didn't. After a couple months of recovery, it started going down again. Me and my coworker watched it go down and started wondering how low it will go. The thing was in the 14,000s, now it is down in the 11,000s?! We wondered, can it go below 10,000? Nah, no way! And of course it did. And it kept going down fast. When the Dow was in the 8,000s, I finally changed my 401k plan from conservative to aggresive again. I naturally though, this is as low as we can go. Of course, it kept going down some more. It finally reach rock bottom (I hope) at around 6,600 and it is slowy going up again.

This brings us to me playing the stocks. While the Dow was in the 8000s, I decided to start a Sharebuilder account and start investing into companies. My coworker and I both agreed, stocks has got to be on the way up soon. So many stocks were now a bargain. Looking over my bank account, I decided that I have some extra cash and transfered several hundred dollars into Sharebuilder. I initally bought three stocks, Phillips (PHG), United States Oil Fund (USO), and Tenaris S.A. (TS). PHG and TS have both gone up since I bought them, unfortunately USO has not. Overall though, I am up from these three stocks. Anyway, in the short four months, I have become an investor in seven different stocks/funds. It's been a rocky start, and there are they where I am down on one stock, but will be up on another. As of this morning, I have invested $1700 into stocks (I didn't even know I had that much money) and I am slowly making gains from them (Just 1% for now). It would be more, but I do have to pay a trade fee everytime I make a trade in Sharebuilder. Also, if USO wasn't down 22%, I'd have even more. Anyway, hopefully this recession is on the way out and the stocks recover.