[ISneezeFunny]

Currently a 22 year old college student...

I started investing when I was barely out of high school... putting in any leftover money into mutual funds and small stocks here and there.

I bought 10 shares of bsc last October... at around 120.

Current price... brimming @ 6.

That's a lot of pizzas...

Anyone else have a sob story?

[Ace High]

Too bad about the bust in your choice for a company. Seems like you did pick a winner but nobody saw the bust coming. Who would have thought about the crisis piling up the way it did. Good thing you didn't lose any more money.
Ace

[twinkiedooter]

Next time invest in something that makes more sense. Only people with money to lose play the stock market. I bought a lot of Pennsylvania Railroad stock back in the 1970's and lost my fricking shirt. I didn't have that money to lose. Never again will I play the stock market. I'd rather take my money and make a nice bonfire to roast weenies or marshmallows over than play the market. Jut my personal uptake on the situation. Unles you know all the ins and outs of how to properly buy short buy long, etc. don't throw your money away.

[ISneezeFunny]

I have to disagree twinkiedooter. The stock market will always gain in the long run.

As far as details go, I shorted on bsc when it was at 88... then it went down to 30 ish, so I made a nice ~500 gain after commissions, then I figured it could only go up from there... so I took the gains and bought another 20 shares and put it on long.

... then I was in class when I get a news flash update on my phone saying that it would dip down to 15 - 20 a share... since I was in class, and couldn't do anything, I figured... I'd just grit it and bear it... about 300 loss...

Then I got out of class and found it dipped to 2.. . lost 840.. . pain.

[morgaine300]

I have to disagree twinkiedooter. The stock market will always gain in the long run.

Totally agree. The overall market gains in the long run, even though individual stocks may not. If you have the money to lose, experiment. If you don't, stick with the mutual funds, preferably index or at least large cap ones. At your age you can go higher risk if you have the money to spare.

Twinkydooter, you seem to have had one bad experience and have decided the entire stock market is a bad place to be. Every investor does lose money in something, somewhere along the way. However, the idea is not to stick everything in one place and then have the bad fortune to have that one place be a loss. The idea is to diversify, buying more of the less risky stuff and less of the more risky stuff. You sound too much like you're just trying to figure out individual stocks and trying to time them. As said above, just stick with a nice safe index fund. And then be in it for the long run (and ignore times like right now when everything looks like crap -- you have to get over the hurdles without losing your cookies, which makes you lose money). If you look at the history of the overall market, it has always gone up. So if you buy into the overall market, it will go up.

Nearly everyone who loses (overall net) in the market makes the common mistakes. It's not really about always knowing the perfect thing to do all the time. No one knows that. The good investors are the ones who will tell you that they've had their share of losses. But they either stay lower risk, or have enough diversity that in the long run the gains outweigh the losses.