Lock, stock, and an unsmoked wallet

I’m the kind of person that finds stocks, shares, and financial instruments interesting. If I didn’t go in to tech, I still probably wouldn’t have gone in to finance, but it’s nice to think I might have.

Whether it’s watching films like The Big Short (an impressive 91% accuracy marker) or listening to Podcasts about trading, I’ll consume finance content in any form. I’ve bought the Financial Times, do I understand most of it? No, but the rabbit really likes it as a hutch liner, so I can pretend to be financially literate and he can tear up and piss all over some fatcat.

I’ve a couple of [Indvidiual Savings Accounts (ISAs)][isa] which are managed and invested in green shares; no oil here. They’ve done moderately well, but I’ve always wondered how it all works underneath.

I’m fascinated by Bloomberg Terminals, havnig done an interneship at Thomson Reuters and seeing some of the tech behind, it was fascinating. When I need to focus, sometimes I put on BloombergTV (cough NERD cough) because I’m vaguely interested. You know that they could roughly predict the US Presidential Election by some financial instruments performance? True story, and quite scary.

Well, last year I actually dipped my toe in and decided to get a Trading212 account. The promise of a free fractional share, and having a little extra money I didn’t mind (I would) mind losing in case I made some horrific decisions spurred me on.

I was cautious, and bought the dips on a few companies knowing they’d bounce back; like Crowdstrike (CRWD). Am I going to do that wanky thing of putting stocktickers after company names? Probably, if I’m going to be a finance bro, I may as well go all in.

A finance bro yes, I’m going to write about my trades. Both because I need the experience, but also for low-key low-volume low-risk trades, I think I could possibly help show that it’s not that scary? I avoided Bitcoin like the plague (until 2022, but that’s a blogpost for another day) but the stock market is here forever. So there’s no time like the present.

What is this series then?

Well, sometimes to learn about something it helps to write and teach others.

I want to share how I do trading (who knows, maybe I’ll make a YouTube video) but I also want to branch out to other things. How does one go short, and go long, that kinda thing. I roughly know what shorting is (I bet they’re going to lose money) but I’d like to know more.

We’re also going to look at different types of stocks; from companies like Google or Ford, to commodities like gold or tin or wine. Or something else.

There’s no real fixed journey for this, but I would like to make money. Safely, with relatively low risk. But life is expensive, and I’m sure as heck not going to get a good following on OnlyFans, so shares it is!

Not financial advice!

Now comes the super important bit. This isn’t financial advice, you wouldn’t take it from me anyway, but it can’t hurt to balance out the field right? Any activity you perform after reading my blog is entirely of your own volition. If it works out, great. If it doesn’t work out, I’m really sorry.

What’s your starting position?

Well, I’ve purchased a few shares in a few different companies. Mostly tech, partly my employer (within guidlines, I hasten to add), and when they’ve dipped.

At the time I thought I’d start writing this blog because it was interesting, I had a 90% rate of returns… however, I missed a few sales since then and I’m now down to about 80%. Still really good, but annoyingly, I’ve missed some.

At the time of writing, mid February, I had £2,790.25 invested.

I sold off my Crowdstrike shares as they were peaking, and I didn’t think they’d reach higher than their peak following on from their planet-scale outage.

Palo Alto I’ve held on to, as they hit a peak, mostly because I never got around to actually hitting the sell button.

Nvidia, well, I bought low because their earnings call was on the horizon and with ✨ everything AI ✨ they’re doing super well. Then DeepSeek came out, shattered standards (pretty well), and a botched RTX5 series launch meant I’ve now lost a bit of money on Nvidia. Which is fine, because we’re not shorting stock, and it will bounce back. It is after all, Nvidia.

There’s one company I won’t mention, even by name, because they’re not going to feature in this series. I’m not in any position to know any inside information, nor do I even want the possibility of impropriety, and it’s easy to just leave them out. I won’t blur them out, because then it looks like I’m hiding something, but they won’t feature in any righting.