April 2026. I sold all my shares of Alibaba (BABA). It was 15.65% of my brokerage, the only stock I had bought for international exposure, and it was up 44.75%. I moved most of the money into an emerging markets ETF that still holds Chinese stocks. I had been buying it since October 2021. The…
September 2022. I was looking at my brokerage account, and almost all companies I invested in were marked red. The market was already down 17% from the beginning of the year. I continued investing and even increased the amount. For the whole year I saw my portfolio go lower and lower, crossing double negative digits….
Late winter 2022. I saw headlines in the news about gas and oil shortages around the world. That was a huge shortage, with many countries involved. Millions of people needed energy. Whole industries could stop working. Four years later, one stock I bought during that shortage had nearly doubled. Europe was one of the places…
I was keeping up with news from the sectors I had stocks in: energy, resources, technology and hardware. I also checked my two retirement accounts, 401(k) and Roth IRA, just to see the balance and performance. But I didn’t read earnings reports or news for anything there, because there was no single company to track….
I’m 24, $700 a month in 401(k) plus brokerage will be fine. I had a brokerage account, my only investment account, and I was fine with that until my new job offered a retirement plan called 401(k). I heard about it but never used it or researched it, and I had no idea what a…
June 2020. I bought 0.131759 Nvidia shares for $50, at $379.48 each. It’s been 17 days since my first investment purchase, Antero Midstream. I still hadn’t seen the result of my first investment, but I couldn’t wait to prove my research and selection process worked. I had another $50 ready for my next purchase, with…
I was reading news when I received a notification that the car loan balance was paid off. I definitely felt some relief, as from now on I would be saving $301 a month I had already planned for. Paying it off early felt like the end of the story. But that was actually the moment…
I needed to start planning a road trip that I put in my calendar a long time ago. What crossed my mind, places to stop, hotels, food, rental or driving my own. That would be a whole evening of research. I had a framework I refined over a few trips. It involved deciding on dates…
I was going through my annual spending and budget review in late December. I already had a budget in place for the last year and an emergency fund built. I went through every category, comparing what I had spent against what I wanted to allocate going forward. At first, I built a simple spreadsheet with…
I was sitting on my balcony with a laptop, running math and thinking about emergency funds. My goal was to put my emergency fund into a high yield savings account (HYSA). I had hours blocked off in my head before I even opened a browser. In my mind, this meant researching banks first that had…