An approach you could take to beginning a trading or investing program is: Set up a new blog on Blogger. Go through your stock selection routine, and pick a stock. It could be one you want to buy, or one you want to watch, or an example of something. Create a post for that one stock.
OK, backing up, I'm doing most of my stock selection at Finviz. For example, on the home page, there, stocks that are moving fast are listed. It's basically or sort of a list of whatever's moving fastest at the moment. It'll change to some extent from moment to moment, and even more from day to day. Anyway, if a stock has moved upward dramatically, for one thing, you might want to see what the situation was like just before it moved, and, for another thing, you might want to follow the stock, because it could move again some time, and, if you're watching, you might be able to predict exactly when. Want to learn prediction, though, or try to? How about a plan like this: make lots of predictions, and carefully document them, like this: "on this day I predict this stock will soon(definition) go up to (price) from (price). Here's the chart today. My reasoning: (reasoning)." Now you can watch the stock and see how you did for accuracy and correctness.
Without a proper system this is difficult to do or even impossible. Here's the thing about Finviz: you can embed their charts in a blog. To do this you need a blog - Blogger works so well! I'm just saying. Then you can embed charts. So let's imagine you went to the Finviz home page, and there you noticed that some particular stock was up 1000%. If it says it's up 1000% that means it's up 1000% in one day. Boy, if you could predict that kind of thing ... Well, a lot could be said about whether prediction is possible, and how it might be done, or might not be done, but, setting all that aside, there is a chart. If a stock is listed somewhere on Finviz, there's usually a chart you can get by clicking the listing, or the symbol, or whatever. I mean, there will be a pattern in that chart, just before it made its big move, and it's not completely illogical - in terms of arbitrary logic - to think that if you see another pattern like that somewhere - though it's a tricky business - you might be seeing a big rally any day there. Based on that logic, you might want to look at the chart, and you might even want to look at it over and over again. So, at the page for the chart, there's a publish link, and it will offer you two kinds of chart for embedding, a static chart that always shows the exact chart you are currently looking at, whenever someone visits the page you are embedding it in, and a dynamic chart that shows the latest pattern for the stock whenever someone visits your page.
I am therefore creating a new post, whenever I find a new stock I'm interested in, with a static chart of the pattern as it was when I became interested, and a dynamic chart so I can look at the two charts together and tell at a glance exactly what the stock has done since I posted the static chart. Let's go over this again. One kind of pattern I'm interested in is when a stock goes up a lot really fast. I want to study its chart over and over and think about how the pattern before the big rally maybe would have predicted the rally. But, also, a stock that goes up a lot could go up a lot more again, but it could also - you will see this a lot - go down again almost as fast - even just as fast - as it went up. And then, after it has done that, it could go up fast again. Keep in mind, here, that the word "after" is a flexible descriptor. The point is, if you watch a bunch of stocks that have gone up fast - and there are always stocks doing that - you can maybe learn to interpret what's going on. How far back down will this go? How long will it stay down? What will the next rally look like? Maybe you can learn that. You definitely can't if you don't watch a lot of stocks. Well, some people will say there are other ways than watching charts, and better ones. In fact, they'll say watching charts is useless. I suppose you could take their word for it ... or you could take a chance, watch a lot of charts, and see how you feel after you've actually done it some. Here's the thing: if you set up a set of charts, a static chart and a dynamic one, from Finviz, on one page, which is one blog post, so you can see them both at once, and you set up a bunch of pages in such a way that, in a few minutes, in the afternoon or evening, every day, you can look at all those page - and you can do that - then you can closely watch, I'm gonna say, a large number of stocks. My system is still a mess, but I'm seeing my way to doing this. I'm developing rules.
Each stock gets its own post, when it shows up for the first time on your radar, and you use the labels feature to label it "new comment", or some such thing. Once you've done your first new comment post, go to the design link in Blogger, if you can find that - it's on the blog when you're logged in, is one place - and, selecting the Layout option, create a text gadget, or, as you prefer, a link list gadget. Create a link (in the text gadget you do that by typing in the code for the link, <a href="the url for the post">symbol</a>) to ... you labeled the new post ... go to the blog and look for the label at the bottom of the post, and click that. That takes you to a page of all posts labeled "new comment", or whatever you named the label. Copy the url for that page into your link to "new comment" posts. Now you can always get all the "new comment" posts (for now there's just one, later there will be lots) with one click. And that's your tool for checking all those stocks as often as you like. You will find it effective - I mean, you might not succeed in making predictions, but you will be able to review your charts thoroughly and with sort of unique ease. Try it and see if you agree.
Now, from time to time, you might feel that the static chart on a post is getting sort of out of date, or maybe you will have added so many note - because you can always add notes - that it has become cumbersome to look at the post, like, you can't see the charts and the notes at the same time. By the way, one thing that makes these posts efficient to review is that you can see everything together, relating to a particular matter, in one view, or with a minimum of scrolling. This is a very hard trick, in programming, but you will find that even a crude implementation does wonders. Anyway, your post might be out of date, but you might want to keep it for future reference, too. So, make a new "new comment" post for the stock. Use a fresh static chart. Label the post "new comment". And add a link to the new post to the last new post for the stock. Then go to the now old post, and remove the "new comment" label. Otherwise, the "new comment" posts page will show the stock twice. You could replace the link with something like "events", where "events" posts show what came before the moment, and what followed it, at least for a time. It's your pattern archive, this new "events" page, which you get by linking to the page you get when you click the "event" label on a post, and which shows all posts labeled "event". Now you have a "new comment" page - all the latest on a collection of stocks - and an "events" page: a record of patterns and events you thought were interesting. Finally, put a link in the old post to the new post. Now you can go through the history of the stock and your thoughts about it by clicking the special purpose "older post" and "newer post" links in your posts (which are not the same as the "older post" and "newer post" links Blogger creates itself, for every page, which link you to newer and older posts on the blog, not newer and older posts for a stock, of course).
By the way, it would probably be a great idea to create a list - in a post - of every stock you've added. Create that list when you first add a stock, and add that stock (it's symbol) to the list. Make the symbol into a link to the new post. Always add symbols to the list in alphabetical order, and add the symbol to the list every time you chart a new stock you haven't charted on the blog before. Now, in the future, when you see an interesting chart on Finviz, but you aren't sure if it's already on the blog, you go to the list, and you can tell instantly whether it is or not.
Also, if you buy a stock, make a note on the post for it. You might want to archive the last post and create a new one, with a chart for the time you bought it. You might want to bring some information forward from the old post to the new one. For example, one thing which I think would be a good idea is, if you bought a stock, and some time went by, and it's still at a low price, buy some more. We'll talk about this again. You have to work out the interplay of risk and, oh, I don't know what. The point is, you now have two positions, and you want to see them both on the new post. Also, when you sell a stock - this almost goes without saying - make a new post. Record the moment. You aren't going to stop watching it - you want to see what happens after you sell it! And it might be a buy again some time. - but record the moment. And another thing is, you can label stocks you own "positions", or whatever, and put that on your link list, and then you can review your positions effortlessly. Do you remove positions from the general list? If you leave the "new comment" label when you add a "positions" label, the stocks you own will remain on the general list. You'll still be able to see you own them because your purchases are recorded. I like to record a purchase in a kind of condensed format, like this: date, number of shares, price, commission, and the total amount paid, including commission. I leave off labels and dollar signs - just the numbers separated by spaces.
I just realized I haven't been indicating whether these notes refer to a purchase or a sale. I imagine you'll want to record sales, too.
And yes, by the way, a Blogger blog is completely public. There's no private setting, as far as I know. It's a strange kind of place to choose to record your trades. It just has such advantages. I try to let people know how little I know, and how inexpert I am, and that this is just my record-keeping, and not any kind of advice. Of course I'm recording advice here, but it's in the manner of general observations and things you could try ... it may be advice, but it's also reasoning. It's completely full of caveat emptor statements. I could probably be more thorough about that, but it's not like I'm just completely leaving them out.
A spreadsheet or some such thing could do the job, in private. The thing is, it's so boring doing it in private. I don't really want to.
Always, I'm developing my thinking on these things. Maybe, when I get better, which is what this system is designed to do for a person, I'll ... oh, never mind.
I think what I've posted thus far is fairly complete. It's a system. You might be able to do something with it.
Maybe you can just watch some patterns develop with it. Or maybe you can make money with it (and by doing that). Who know?
I was thinking if you set it up this way you can just get rid of the blog history gadget. (Remember gadgets and how we edited them?) It takes up a lot of space, and it's sort of a powerful tool, or feels like one, and if you just took it away it might be a disaster, and maybe it's good as a kind of advertising, but, you know what? It takes up a lot of space ... and it's annoying! Maybe I'll come back to this. Maybe it needs to be thought out a tad more. But the point is, by linking and labeling and listing the posts as described here, you create a system for navigating a whole body of content, one that probably will allow you to find any post you want, any time you want it. What more do you want?!
So, I debate back and forth what to say about analysis per se. What kinds of charts are we looking for? What kinds of charts do we want to add to our pages? How do we go about looking for new stocks to watch? How do we make buying and selling decisions? Maybe we should figure these things out for ourselves. A system like this will allow you to test your decision making. It's a paper trading system. Write "I like it" on a post, and later you can write "I was right" or "now I would sell it" or "it went down, boo." Then you can write about why, looking at it now, it was obviously wrong from the start. I always see something. I don't know if I'm right - got that: I don't know - but I do always feel like there were clues. If only I could look at more examples. I need a system like this one. But the thing is, there are deeper questions. Is this trading? Is it legit? Isn't it risky and improbable? Let's say I want to try it anyway? How should I approach it? How much money should I put into it?
The thing is, lots of stocks that go up a lot fast then come down a lot fast. If you buy them when they're cheap, which the system might allow you to do, and then fail to sell them when they're dear it sure will look like a missed opportunity. You could have had cash, and now all you've got is a stock that's cheap again. Now, there are rumors of stocks that behave differently. They just go up and up. And it's said they are the key to truly great profits. Problem is, it's hard to find the actual evidence. I mean, you can read your Benjamin Graham, and you should, but it's still hard. (Really, read Security Analysis. Read The Intelligent Investor, to introduce yourself to the system, but get both books.) I mean, the evidence is there, in the form of Warren Buffett, and similar types, but what exactly did they actually do? Well, OK, that's a cop out, but here's the thing: it is easy to find the evidence of and about stocks that have gone up a lot fast. Go figure. All I can say is, I still find this compelling.
But boy have I made a lot of mistakes. I've had some dramatic successes, but I'm not yet an overall success due to all my mistakes ... and to my ongoing mistakes. So I'm going to say this: leave yourself room to make lots of mistakes.
Now, there are at least three reasons for doing that. One is, you might learn from your mistakes. It's said that happens. Another is, you might make lots of mistakes, and then it would be good if you didn't, so to speak, run out of room. But the third one is interesting: you might make fewer mistakes if you leave yourself room. But, of course, you aren't entirely sure what I mean by leaving yourself room.
