What works for me

I have been dabbling in the stock market for a few years now, with ups and downs. While I did not lose anything I could not afford to, I also lost out on some chances to earn the bucks. I am now trying to be more diligent in trading - recording what I do and what I've learnt, doing reading, making full use of the tools I have. So here's what I have learnt so far:

1) Stay out of day/technical trading. I simply do not possess the discipline nor the tenacity to thoroughly utilise technical techniques to make this profitable. MACD's and dragonfly doji's can only influence so much in a world so interconnected and currently economically unstable. Headlines overshadow everything - whether it's the Euro crisis (Greece, and now Spain), the US debt, Iran, to name a few.

2) Close the gate once you're done. If my trading portal stays open, I tend to search and "hunt" for something to do (i.e. buy, with what little information I gather in about half an hour. Not recommended). That's just the way it is. So once I have done what I intended to do, I logoff.

3) .......BUT keep track of what's going on. Have I mentioned that I can't live without my iPhone? Other than keeping photos of Boo, noting down songs for downloading later, recording my latest gastronomy discoveries and Facebook-ing, the nifty Bloomberg app keeps me up to date on what I want to monitor. Economic news, prices and trends of stocks on my watchlist. I can't trade, but at least I know what's happening.

4) Be selective. I have fallen for the herd mentality too many times. Whether it was succumbing to Analysts' recommendations (never made money off it, by the way), buying only after the publishing of good news, I realise now that it is all just too late. Now I monitor a few stocks I like, buying and selling when I see fit. And I can do that (with some confidence) because I keep track of their movements and know when low is really low and there is potential to rebound. There is no free lunch, whether it's analyst reports or Hedge fund managers' picks on CNBC. Just do your homework, and more importantly, stick to your guns.

4) Again, an iteration here, but in this interconnected world, one has to keep track of what's going on. You might have missed out on buying Apple at $21 (oh, and read about NY Times' readers' financial mistakes here - very interesting indeed. It made me feel somewhat less of a failure). And you might never want to see the APPL ticker ever again. That's what I felt. But there could be another crisis opportunity (and we have seen a few), another false alarm. But you wouldn't be able to tell if you didn't keep track. Opportunities knock more often than we think. We just have to be ready to answer the door.