My first real investment didn’t move for six months. I still made 25%.

I got a free random share from the brokerage account I signed up for. I had no idea what the company was or whether it was worth anything. 

After trial and error with binary options and Hashflare (Read full story here) I figured the right tool for me was a brokerage account. I researched platforms  and found one that was regulated, reputable and had a clean user interface. One of the platforms gave me a free share – Antero Midstream.

The hardest part was understanding what I wanted to invest in. Since I knew I wanted to invest long term, I needed to pick an industry. My observation and experience told me that the energy sector, specifically gas and oil, even with the growing popularity of electricity, weren’t going anywhere anytime soon. I was also looking for a company that would be a middle-player, where every other step would depend on it. I thought that demand in this case would grow faster, which meant growing revenue, which would lead to growing share prices – eventually, my goal. Small market capitalization was also important to me, I believed this would leave more room to grow. I considered tax benefits the company would get from the government, and I also researched its past performance and its owners. I only verified that these were real people. I didn’t know many facts about the company until I started to read news about it, which also proved the company was legitimate and had a future.

I figured that I already owned a single share of Antero Midstream – a company that actually fit my requirements, so I performed a full research of it and checked every box in my list. However I didn’t know about quarterly reports, 10-K reports (a company’s annual financial filing) or forecasts, so I missed those. I wanted to have a small shot to prove that I was right and my strategy with research and long term investing worked. 

I planned to allocate around $50 a month toward my investing. But I didn’t have the exact plan for when I would withdraw. I knew that if I stuck with the pattern – eventually I would win in the long term. That was my plan and budget for a 22 year old. I had researched a company and was ready to make my first investment. But it still felt uneasy – real money, real risk. My previous failures had left their mark. So I deposited an initial $50 and bought roughly 10 shares of Antero Midstream. 

I thought stock growth would be more linear. In the next 2 months I kept monitoring performance of my investment, but the price barely moved. I hoped to see at least a couple percent growth and I was definitely checking my investments too often, a couple of times a day.

Great news came when I found extra uninvested dollars available in my account. I thought that was a portion of my initial investment that had somehow been delayed, then I thought it was a bonus from a brokerage. It turned out to be dividends – something I hadn’t even considered as a meaningful part of my return.

That was a 6.2% payout! I did simple math, multiplied dividends by 4 (dividends for Antero Midstream were paid 4 times a year, once a quarter) and realized that it could lead to 25% annual return. Unlike binary options, I didn’t need to spend hours a day watching charts under full-time stress. I knew the demand would keep growing for energy, so I continued investing my planned amount of $50 a month.

However I couldn’t sleep because I wanted to know why dividends were so high. Research revealed that the stock collapsed after COVID, which I knew but hadn’t accounted for. The stock went from $14 in mid 2019 to $4 in mid 2020 (around the time I bought). I looked back at 2019 and dividends were the same, around $0.30 per share. It became clear that the price dropped almost 4 times and dividends that were 10% in 2019 became more than 20% in 2020. It wasn’t that the company had increased its dividend, the stock movement did the job in my favor. I still couldn’t digest it but I liked it very much. I realized I could do much more detailed research, close to what seasoned investors do and catch moments like this frequently.

I started in June and over the year invested roughly $385. My statement on December 31, 2020 showed $474.88. $89.88 growth in six months (almost 19%!) , $15.20 of which were from dividends I never accounted for. But I wanted to know what 10 years of this looked like. I built a calculator to find out.