On the Stock Market

So, a while back I invested some money in the stock market. Not in a mutual fund mind you but in pick a single stock and hang on type schenario. I was alive in the ninties so I have this pervasive mental image that money invested in stocks is like planting a money tree in the back yard. You put $5 in and before you know it, $57.67 has grown in its place. I still remember in my college days thinking, “Boy, if I only had some money I’d really invest in that eBay place!” I remember watching the stock tick gradually up and up and up and up and split and split and split until I was woozy with the math of how much my $10 then would be worth today. OK, it’s only $166, but still. That’s 4.5% interest! I’m sure I would have sold in 2004 when it peaked. Not…

As I sit here today looking at the returns, on one hand I’m happy. I bought in a fairly severe dip in the markets. My Walmart stock is up 11.02% in a month! Microsoft, up 6.5%. Starbucks, up 6.4% in three weeks! Great returns, right? Fuck no. The whole market, on average, was up 12%! Even my absolute best pick, Walmart, suffered worse than the Dow Jones and NASDAQ, both mindless conglomerations of companies that managed 12% gains in the period of a 30 days. God damn. That’s a lot of wasted effort to do WORSE than the average of just a bunch of companies thrown into a bucket.

Every single day I watch the markets hour by hour. One day they’re up and one day they’re down. Today my portfolio was down 1.91%. The Dow was down 2.26%, a miniscule gain. Tomorrow, I’m willing to bet that my portfolio, in obedience to the oscillating markets at large, will be up by about the same margin. This blind zombie obedience makes me regularly consider selling off my entire list of stocks just to buy some index fund. On many levels, I wonder what in the WORLD the point is. Unless I’m smart… impossibly smart and ahead of those MILLIONS of investors trying to do the same thing, I’m just gambling. If I drop $1,000 into Akorn, I might make more than the Dow or I might lose it all in a day. Who knows? I’m not sure any of it is worth the risk. Tomorrow I will sit and hit the refresh button every hour or so and watch my money go up….. (hopefully) and inevitably go down…. All based on the whims and speculations of millions of other investors who are influenced by random stories on the radio or a single internet speculation. Who can compete with that? Not me. I’m just gambling. It’s like slot machines with one-share minimum.