Personal Experiences with the Current Stock Market

My best advice about buying and selling stocks is don't buy and sell stocks in the current or any other market. My four chapter series, "Stock Investing Without the Risks of Owning Stock" describes the stock option alternative that has brought joy and peace and profit to my trading life. It is not necessary to personally experience the losses many people are taking in the current stock market.

While the current stock market has been crashing, my personal experience with stock option trades has been and will keep on making money after the market bottoms out and returns to the upside of this cycle. My emphasis on "cycle" is for calling attention to something that many, many people don't know about or choose to ignore. One way to see the stock market cycle is to put symbol "SPY" on a ten year chart where it will be plain to see - and believe.

My initial shock in personaly experiencing the move from stock to stock option trading was exposure to a host of written warnings, alerts and legal boiler plate about the risks attendant to option trading. After three years of personally experiencing the many losses and mistakes that go with self taught trading skills, it is a very rare thing for me to take a loss on a stock option trade; but it is certainly not rare for me to hear moaning and groaning from people invested in shares of current market stocks.

Locating the best stocks to underlay profitable options was one of my toughest personal experiences. The beauty of self taught skills is the privilege of making all the mistakes on my way to the right place - which for me is volume. Every day after the stock market close, I am looking at BarChart.com [one of many sources] at the 250 highest volume stocks for recording on my spread sheet and putting through a screening process that ultimately produces good stocks for underlying option trades.

Probably my most unforgettable personal experience came from the first and last time I engaged a securities broker to manage my "discretionary" investment account. This personal experience lasted one week and took away half of my account value. The time when trading knowledge belonged to a favored few is relegated to history by numerous brokerage firms tutorials. For example, my optionsXpress tutorial is simple and thorough; and their live online help is always available to answer questions.

Current stock market aside, will never be a better time for the personal experience of learning stock options trading. And, with a handle on that skill, you might want to have a look at babypips.com for the path to Forex trading which, if you think there is money in options ....... WOW!