I want to help you become a better investor. I am tired of all the investment get rich quick schemes and hype out there. With all the ups and downs of the market, making heads or tails of what is going on can be difficult or impossible. Pulling the trigger to buy (or sell) stock can be a tough and emotional decision.
Let me start with a little background. My name is Bret Beaupain and I am an individual investor, meaning I direct my own investments and don’t just blindly trust them to someone else. I am a bit of a blue collar investor, working my way up through investment knowledge without business education or training at a broker/exchange. I got my "Street Smarts" from the Street, winning some and definitely losing some. Don't get me wrong, I am civil engineer so I have an education and some smarts, but I just want you to know that I am probably just like you, learning investing from books, the internet and the tough alleys of Wall Street.
My primary goal with investing is to use a method that will outperform the benchmark S&P 500. That's it. I am not looking for penny stocks and the amazing overnight stock success stories. I live here in the real world where penny stock success stories and stocks that double in a week are the exception not the norm. Then, even if you do find one stock that you think might double, do you have enough cajones to put all your money into it to make that "killing"? Would you be willing to take a mortgage your house or something to invest all the money because it is a sure thing? Not me, I prefer to take an outlook of... Well, not necessarily get rich slowly, but get rich reasonably. Getting rich slowly via investing is not very exciting (regardless of whether it works or not), so I choose to get rich reasonably.
I began my investing career in early 2000. My wife (girlfriend at the time) said to me one day, “I need a hobby.” I agreed and said I needed one too. She picked surfing, which is a little tough because we live in the Pacific Northwest near the Puget Sound, so not many waves close by and a hot sun is generally non-existent. I chose to take on the stock market. I had always had a desire to learn about investing in stocks, but never knew exactly where to start. So, I chose my hobby and began my investing career.
More to come in my next post where I will start detailing how I gained my investment knowledge. My eventual goal is to try to disseminate my 10+ years of investing knowledge to you in a package that won’t take you the same 10 years to learn.
Cheers,
Bret