We've been in an economic downturn that's been rattling around for about a year now, with most bear market indicators pointing towards either a resolution before years end or a deep worsening of the economic situation. This means it's either the worst time to invest your money, or the best time.

During the GameStop rush of 2021, the retail investing market exploded, leading to many new investors having a lot of wealth wiped out by cashing out long holds. I'm still hearing chatter on those stocks. I put about $1000 into Blackberry during the meme stock craze and made off with about $300 in profit in just a day. This is not how things are supposed to work, I thought, so I invested the winnings into a few small companies I believed in and held onto them for a few months, losing all of the winnings in the beginning of the downturn. Back at square one, I withdrew the money and decided to come back to it when I had more money and a more clear idea of how to handle it.

Aside from the recent struggles in the market, have you ever gotten involved in stock trading? With a lot of digitized broker services available through apps such as Public or Robinhood, it's easier than ever to put money in.

I have never invested in stocks, but everyone keeps telling me that I should. I just have a hard time gambling on things that I cannot control.

In college, one of my classmates gave a presentation about how his dad gave him $10K to mess around with, he ran that up to 200K through the stock market, then decided to put it all into Bitcoin (during the peak of its hype), and lost it all when it crashed.

I just don't feel like taking those risks lol.

I've only been invested in index funds for the past few years through Fidelity. After watching several YouTube videos on stocks and investing, I decided that index funds would be a good fit for me as a young, new investor. Historically, low-cost index funds generally outperform actively managed funds while being incredibly low risk. Of course, there is still the degree of risk that comes with investing, but with the specific index fund I chose to mirror, the S&P 500, the money I invest is spread across the top 500 companies in the United States--a small percentage goes into Apple, Amazon, Microsoft, etc.

Part of what made index funds such an attractive option to me (besides Warren Buffet himself having gone on record many times swearing by index funds as an investment,) is that declines in any of the 11 major sectors--technology, finance, real estate, etc are offset by gains in other sectors. Probably the biggest takeaway from what I learned about investing is that past or current performance is not indicative of future performance-- Apple could be absolutely crushing it right now, but they could easily make a terrible product or business decision and then your Apple stocks plummet, and you lose money because you only invested in Apple and Pepsi. The diversity provided by index funds give you a nice safety net in the event any of the top companies are on the decline. One final boon of index funds is that they are very hands-off--you put some money in each month and then you walk away and let them grow, giving you an average annual return of about 11% a year.

My dad worked for the Canadian National Railway and I think employees get stock automatically or something like that

Back in middle school, we had to do a profile for a computer class to learn about stocks and how they work in real life. I wasn’t sure how it worked since it was a simulation of how stocks function, like you would really gonna let us use real stocks at middle school, pfffft.

Anyways that was my introduction to stocks. I didn’t get into actual stocks until the whole “GameStop” incident that happened a few years back and I bought into it before it hit its peak (was like near it. Was at $65 at that time) I pulled out a bit too early before it hit its actual peak and only gained like $25 out of it due to me feeling somewhat paranoid about it falling soon. It’s not something I would like to get into due to the high risk but it was a learning experience.

I've been big into stocks for around 10 years now but never been able to make much because I always sell before things get good.

I made a thread a long time ago about how I sold a stock for $88 and give days after I sold, the price went over $100,000.

https://www.vizzed.com/boards/thread.php?id=92938


Right now I'm focusing on safe stocks that pay dividends so that I can invest and then slowly make money over time.

Nope, never. But I have invested into stocks before, I did Doge coin, I did 20$, and got 20$.

zanderlex : Jeez! 100,000$? That's a ton.