My Self Guided Journey into the Stock World and all it's Possibilities

  My Daily Market Reflection - The Market is an Ecosystem: On Friday the market saw one of the worst pullbacks since October. My portfolio was not immune to this. In fact, my stocks dropped a whopping 5.5% (this is a lot for one day) and continued to do so in the aftermarket. The reason? Reddit users and their quest to screw over the rich man. Believe me, I get it and I’m all for knocking the rich down a peg but the stock market is like an ecosystem and when there is a disruption to the system, it creates a ripple effect. If you don’t know about the whole Reddit scheme, I’ve included an image that explains it quite well (I did not make this image). Here’s why it’s problematic not only for the rich: When the rich lose, we all lose and the rich will never lose for long. These Reddit users’ main intention was not to make money, but to take revenge on rich investors and hedge funds that do in fact manipulate the market for their own personal gain all the time (I’ll come back to this). Soun

  My Daily Market Reflection - Brace for a Pullback: I plan to start every post with a reflection on how my stocks are doing on the day I post. I’m going to be very honest with you. Today was not a green day for my portfolio or for most of the market. I had expected this. My portfolio went up a whopping 13% this past week and if I’ve learned anything, it’s that when things go up, they must go down. Whenever you see immense growth too quickly, brace for a pullback but don’t be alarmed by it because it usually never pulls back as far as it grew. Ladies (and dudes with man buns), think of the market like a hair elastic (thanks dad for the help on this simile). When you stretch out a hair elastic, eventually you let it go and it snaps back almost to its original size (key word being almost). It usually never shrinks back to the size it was before. It’s a little bigger now but still you had to stop stretching it or it would eventually break. That’s how the stock market works too. If there’s

My Life Before the Stock Market: For my entire adult life, I’ve always had this overwhelming sense of dread when it came to my financial future. As a teacher, I’ve struggled to support myself and have had to work one or more various side jobs just to stay afloat. When the pandemic hit, I, like so many others saw it as just another financial setback at a time in my life where it finally felt like I was getting on top of my credit card debt and turning things around.  All of a sudden, I lost my side gig (serving at a restaurant) and my credit cards were back to being maxed out. It felt unfair, as if the financial gods were out to get me. And the kicker for me was, I did everything right. “Go to college,” they said. “It will pay for itself,” they said. “You’ll never be able to get a decent paying job without it.”  Well there I was in my not-so-decent paying job, which also required a masters’ degree (more money wasted) living in serious debt in the middle of a worldwide crisis, trying to