I never bought on margin. Scottrade gave me quite a large one in ratio to the amount I kept in the account. I knew not to play the market with borrowed money. But there it was in front of me every day. Then when I became inactive, they took most of my margin away.
I'm 73 years old so long-term has no appeal; somebody else or nobody will get the benefit of it. I don't want to think about why that matters right now but it does.
I wish I had a mind for some of the more complicated plays. But you have the right idea and have a sensible approach to investing.
Get rich quick. The real thing that appealed to me about playing around day and swing trading was that I pretended that my life depended on it and I was doing real work. I never was worth anything when I worked. When I would make a modest gain sometimes in an hour or less most traders wouldn't bother with, it made me feel like I had accomplished something after all.
I lost money, too, but my first and only year of it I had a very modest net gain. Now I am afraid to jump in again as I struggled to get where I am which could have been a whole lot better like those couples who call Bob Brinker but my life fell apart financially actually before and when I was divorced. I never had a 401K or anything like what those people do. A few are single and give him the credit for teaching them how to invest their money. But I think they were part of a generation that had more external forces in their favor than now, could be wrong about that.
73 years old so long-term has no appealThere are insurance companies that are willing to bet their money that we got about a decade we can count on. That's enough time for say, a typical stock fund to double. Something else is that ten years from now those same tables say we'll have get another eight years after we've done the ten --and then it goes on and on.
My thinking is that we can either create more than enough wealth or we can find ourselves without enough to meet our needs, so I work for the 'more than enough' side. Beyond that there's lots of good people'n'things I can pick from for getting what's left over when I'm done.
