• Invested in Mutual Funds (1990-1991)
  
  
• Decided to dabble in Stocks 1992 and had no idea what I was doing.  (1992)
  
  
• Read some investing books involving successful investing strategies and used these principles to screen for Stocks and incorporate Technical Analysis.  (1993-1997)
  
  
• Started to Day Trade in 1998 and thought it would be easy money.  Boy was I wrong on that assumption.  (1998-1999)
  
  
• After urging from investors on the Yahoo Message Boards I decided to start my own Investing Web Site.  (1999)
  
  
• Continue to own and operate amateur-investor.net (1999-2005)

I first started investing in the stock market back in 1990 and began in mutual funds. The in 1992 I decided to start investing in stocks. Like most investors initially I had no clue what to invest in and just focused on those stocks primarily in the Dow. After a year or so I started to notice how some stocks would do really well while others would do absolutely nothing.   After reading a few investing books that dealt with successful investing strategies I began to start using these principles to screen for stocks. However it took me a few more years to fully understand these principles and how to integrate Technical Analysis into the equation as well.

By 1996 I began to use these strategies looking for stocks and incorporating Technical Analysis as well. Of course we all have to learn from our mistakes and initially I made some. However I have always followed the rule to have a proper "Stop Loss" strategy in place no matter what type of market environment exists. This has saved me quite a few times over the past several years from having a minimal loss turn into a much bigger one. Nobody is going to be right all of the time when selecting stocks to invest in. The key to online investing for a beginner is to keep your losses to a minimum when you are wrong about a stock.

Meanwhile starting in 1998 I began to dabble in Day Trading as I thought it would be easy to do. However this turned out be a bad assumption but I learned a lot by doing it and saw how the Market Makers can control the movement of a Stock's price. Believe me stocks are manipulated on a daily basis and always have been but until I experienced Day Trading I never would have believed it. At any rate I learned a lot from Day Trading and did it for two years in 1998 and 1999 until I got burned out from it as I got tired of looking at Level II screens all day long. Fortunately I was one of those Day Traders that made some money although many lost a ton of money trying it thinking that they were going to become millionaires doing it.

During 1997 and 1998 I spent quite a bit of time on the Yahoo Message Boards talking about stocks with other investors. With time quite a few investors asked me if I would start an investing site on the internet that dealt with Fundamental and Technical Analysis.  As a result I then developed Amateur-Investor.net in 1999 to help small investors with both stock selection and market analysis.

Since the launch of this site in late 1999 the average gain on the Stocks I have focused on has been fairly consistent considering we have seen one of the worst Bear Markets ever over the past few years.

I spend from 20 to 30 hours a week researching stocks looking for those companies that have the potential to do well in the future. It takes a lot of hard work to be successful in the stock market and you pretty much have to pay attention to it everyday. The easy days of the late 1990's when investors could buy just about anything related to technology and see the stock price double or triple in value are gone and may not happen again for quite a long time.

The goal of Amateur-Investor.net is to help both experienced and new investors find the best stocks to invest in using both Fundamental and Technical Analysis. At one time I was just an Amateur Investor and knew nothing about how the stock market worked. Hopefully the experience I have gained during the past 10 years will help you become a successful investor as well in both Bear and Bull Markets. The stock market is a never ending learning process and the more you study it the better off you will be in the long run if you are going to be successful investing in stocks.

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