Well i hope you are taking some of that money off the table as you go.
All kinds of weird s&*t happens in the market, and is most likely to happen to you when you think you can do no wrong.
Imagine investing by doing thorough research evaluating companies and looking for anything undervalued. One of my strategies from a year and 1/2 ago. Working well, hitting winners. Then you buy a stock that seems to be making money hand over fist but is in the toilet. So you load up for 10K worth of shares. OOOPS 20 minutes later it's halted, declared bankruptcy. When it finally trades again your 10K is worth 500 bucks.
Imagine you are making loads off buying into forward splits. You come across a 60:1 forward split. WOW! you say and load up, pickip up 12K worth of stock. After market close OOOPS! Nope that should have been reverse split, sorry for the error. 12K worth $532 next trading day.
Those both happened to me.
Now imagine you buy 50,000 shares of a stock trading @.18 on unusual volume. Unusual volume is one of my favorite plays these days for finding runners. OOOPS! company does a 1000:1 reverse split the next day, you now have 50 shares and the stock is quotes $1.25 x $350. Ahhh my friend STRU. Your $9,000 is now worth $62.50 before commissions. Mind you If this had been you, you would have done well to sell it that fateful day, otherwise 2 weeks later your 50 shares would have been worth $2.50. Or a month later $0.50.
Or lessee, buddy of mine got wiped out on a play. New ticker is WSOX, can't remember what it was before the ticker change/reverse split. Was trading around .32, the reverse was unannounced but I picked it up on OTCBB site. The stock was HOT. Everyone I knew owned it or had owned it. But 30:1 reverse split was coming the next day and I rushed to get everyone to sell. My friend was gone for the afternoon, had most of his money in it. Next day it never got near the $9 that would have made him even. I think that day you would have been lucky to get $2 for the stock. Last I looked it was trading at 0.08
The moral of the story is my mistakes I could afford, I take much, much, much more money off the table than I need when the market is hot, you never know when it's going to turn to sh*(. AND CAN YOU AFFORD TO LOSE ALL OF THAT $10,000, $5,000, $1,000 YOU JUST INVESTED IN A STOCK?
There are many stories in the OTCBB underworld, this has just been a few of them. (But I have more to help the hair on your back stand up) |
