My First Purchase in the Stock Market

This blog is a little more special for me.

Because this tells the very first purchase I had in the stock market.

Yes, that was the time when I was just a little kid wandering in a wide vast field.

Just like starting anew in anything, my clueless personality made all the moves for me.

All I had to hold on was my mustard dream of financial freedom and the belief that stock investing can be a path for that dream. I managed to cut the chase, and applied for an account.

Philstocks was my first online broker, precisely because they required only 5000 initial deposit to actually start trading. (But now I discovered that you can start opening your trading account just by opening a bank account, like in the case of brokers BPI Trade and FirstMetroSec).

Minimum investment required was 5000, but I put down 10k just to put a front that I have more than that. The lady in charge gracefully accepted it after examining my forms, then handed me a receipt, which was also the highest-valued receipt I received ever since.

With my humble 10k initial investment, I was too excited to buy a company share and brand myself a part-owner of a giant company. Hard-core traders would laugh on me for that, but I was already more than happy just giving it a try.

The moment I received my account details, I made my first order.

And my first stock purchase:  2000 shares of Megaworld Corporation (stock symbol MEG) at 1.87 per share.  Wheee!

Make that MONEY!

In my previous blog Look for the MONEY,  I showed a way to find where the MONEY is.

Time to reap what you planted! Yahoo!

Here comes the reason why anyone would spend time exploring the stock market!

In the first place, you invest in something because you hope it would do something good to you in return. It’s all about seeing potential of a company to make your money work hard for you.

So let’s now discuss how one exactly makes money in the stock market.

Time to open wide your pocket now. J

Welcome to the world of sharing!

Here’s the bottom-line: You earn when your company earns.

It’s that straightforward. It’s also flexible.

You lose when your company loses.

It’s pretty obvious. For a company to have something to share with its shareholders, it must be able to generate the money first by itself in the form of company profits.

So assuming your company is successful in achieving their target earnings, there are primarily two basic ways of blessing their shareholders, either through price appreciation and/or giving dividends.

Look for the MONEY in the Philippine Stock Market

PONDERING ON WHAT STOCKS TO BUY?

One of the biggest and common natural trend for starter investors is to ask for the perfect stocks to buy at a particular time.

Well, to be honest, I don’t know.

And I think no one knows!

Photo credit

Surely you would see scattered recommendations and hot tips around (sometimes contradicting) from almost anyone who claims to have the experience and expertise to make such predictions, but those are all presumptions to some extent.

Why?

Because the stock market, while may have some trends, is still unpredictable. If it were not, many would have been millionaires in days.

So a more secure way for your investing is to go back to the core of the matter, examining closely what stocks you’re going to buy (or avoid!).

And since you're looking for additional money,  then why not search for the companies with the actual MONEY?!

Nobody can predict interest rates, the future direction of the economy, or the stock market. Dismiss all such forecasts and concentrate on what’s actually happening to the companies in which you’ve invested. - Peter Lynch

Let's dig this MONEY deeper!