Friday, August 17, 2012

Investing For The First Time As A Kid

By James B. Baldwin


Trading is awesome! Everyone should trade stocks. The benefits that trading brings to anyone who sticks with it are vast. They spill over into and enrich all aspects of our lives, in a myriad of ways extending far beyond the obvious financial rewards. And it's never too late or too early to start learning this fascinating and empowering art.

Learning is naturally empowering and self-feeding, the more you know the more you want to know. And knowledge and diligence ultimately lead to success, which builds self-confidence. Once you start making money trading stocks, and you will if you apply yourself and stick with it, your whole worldview starts to change. As your income becomes less dependent on your time on task, as the markets reward you for the merit of your own decisions, I guarantee you will feel better about yourself and life in general.

When I was 12, my father opened a brokerage account for me. Of course back then you had to actually call your broker on the telephone to make a trade, so it was certainly intimidating at first. Trading, and really anything new, always is. But I bought some stock in IBM and never looked back from there. I saved income from my summer jobs including fishing golf balls out of water traps, mowing lawns, and painting houses. I invested some of my meager surplus income in stocks.

If you are a parent, I'm sure you want your kids to excel in all these critical life traits. Trading is a great way to teach them! Start your kids out young, it's easy and fun. When you take them out to their favorite restaurant, talk with them about the process of getting the food to their plates. Tell them about all the workers from the farmers to the truckers to the cooks, who labor hard and earn a profit for their part in the food chain. If the restaurant is publicly-traded, explain to your kids that they can own a small piece of this business themselves!

Open up a trading account for your kids. It really doesn't matter how much money you can spare, the kids can gradually fund it themselves with cash gifts they receive on birthdays and Christmas and through doing odd jobs. As they slowly buy and sell a few shares in stocks they are interested in because they love the products those companies produce, they will learn the same trading lessons and develop the same awesome life-traits as adults. And starting young, even casual trading as a hobby can literally earn your kids fortunes over their lifetimes. This skillset will almost certainly radically improve their lives.

Trading also develops the wonderful ability to take the long view. The tyranny of the present is intense in this Information Age, everyone worries incessantly about today while carelessly ignoring the past and the future. Trading forces you to transcend today's worries to see the big picture. In order to buy low and sell high, you have to consider any stock's history and future potential. This grows into a universal life-wide ability to keep the present in proper perspective, to not dwell on today's challenges out of proper context.

On the other end of the age spectrum, trading is equally beneficial to the elderly. Sadly many people get bored in old age, it's tragic. They don't exercise their brains so gradually their minds turn to mush. Trading, since it demands endless learning, can seriously slow or even reverse this unfortunate deterioration. Trading provides excitement for elderly folks, helping them feel plugged in to the world again. It gives them something cool to talk about with their friends, kids, and grandchildren. I'm going to continue trading until the day I die to keep my mind in training and razor-sharp.

Trading demands discipline, which has unimaginably-big benefits in all aspects of life. In order to trade, you first have to generate some surplus income. The only way to do this is spend less than you earn. The longer that you live below your means in general, the more you save, the richer you get. This trading-forged discipline virtually ensures you will never have debt problems, never be in an ugly situation where you risk losing a major asset like your house. It leads to a much-happier and less-stressful life.

Starting out small is actually really important. If you start out trading with a lot of money, odds are you will lose it and get discouraged. The great majority of traders lose almost all of their initial capital at some point in their first year or so of trading. It is par for the course. But the hard lessons learned, and the skillset developed through those early losses, scale beautifully to any amount of money as your trading prowess grows. Even if you are blessed with lots of surplus capital, start trading small with an amount you can easily afford to lose. As your confidence and skills gradually grow, only then should you start trading bigger.

The amount traded is totally irrelevant. If you can earn a 20% return on $1000 in your earlier years, you can earn a 20% return on $100k or $1m as your capital grows. The critical thing is just to get trading, start small and start learning the lessons stock trading teaches. Get your greed and fear under control and grow your understanding of the markets and stocks when you have little on the line. This foundation is essential to help you thrive someday in the future when you are risking a lot.




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