I have to laugh at myself when I think about the mistakes I made along my investing journey, and how much I’ve learned in under two years.  I realize now that those mistakes have helped make me a much better investor, but I still feel like kicking myself a bit. 

    When I first started, I was obsessed with the business news.  I would check Yahoo! Finance before the markets opened, 2-3 times during the day, and after it closed.  I was so obsessed with what my stocks were doing that I couldn’t go more than a few hours between checking quotes and reading articles and opinions on them.  It took me a while to break this habit and realize that my stocks were going to go up and down on a daily basis, but I didn’t need to check up on them constantly.

    I have come a long ways since then.  I now use a Yahoo! Stocks widget on the desktop of my computer.  This allows me to see what the markets and some of my holdings are doing in real time.  I still glance at it a few times a day out of curiosity, but it doesn’t consume any time like manually checking quotes does.  Other than that, I check them every few weeks  on Yahoo and CAPS, and this keeps me up-to-date on their happenings without taking much time at all. 

    Another thing I regret is all the constant buying and selling that I did.  I would make a buy, hold it for a few weeks, and sell it to buy something else that looked more attractive to me.  I often rushed into a buy without enough research and confidence.  Now I make sure that I am buying what I really want, instead of making rash decisions.  The constant swapping killed me in commissions and caused a lot of headaches around tax time.  Plus, some of the stocks that I sold off for a 5% gain or so have soared since then, and if I would have held onto them I would be sitting on a pretty return right now.  Oh well, I learned from those mistakes as well! 

    In part 4 I said that I would discuss the process of knowing when to sell a stock.  The more I think about it though, I think I would like to use an entire post solely dedicated to that, so that will be in part 6.