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I started investing in April of last year. I set aside $500 to $1,000 each month and sent the money to an online brokerage account. I then started investing. Wow, what a journey. Here is what I did.
By the end of the year, not only had I saved $6,800, but I ended up with an account value of $10,348. So I made $3,548 on top of the money I contributed. That works out to a gain of 52.2%.
How Did I Do That?
To put it simply, I knew a little bit about what I was doing. First off, I am a Chartered Financial Analyst (CFA). This designation took me three years to achieve, but essentially I had to study finance. Plus I worked on Wall Street for a while.
But mostly, I just used common sense and made investments in equities on margin using a value approach. That means I looked for both depressed stocks and ones that I thought were statistically and meaningfully undervalued.
In addition to being “long” as this type of investing is known, I also went “short.” That means I borrowed securities from the brokerage firm and then immediately sold them. I was hoping they would fall. That way I could buy them back at lower prices. There were a…
