Costco Stock Reflection

Coming into this project, I was not really sure how the stock market worked. When I first invested into stocks, I did not know the philosophy of “buy low and sell high.” I thought the complete opposite, so when I bought shares of particular stocks, I bought them when they were high. So I basically started out my project with a big failure. As I was choosing which stocks to invest in, I looked at their six month history on a chart. If they appeared to be pretty steady, I took that as a good investment and bought the stock. Also, I chose businesses that I was fairly familiar with. I had seen the Costco stock come up multiple times on TV while I was watching the news, so I looked into that one first. After reading the comments about how great
of a stock it was, I bought some shares. I waited another day to buy more stocks, and then I bought shares of WalMart, Wells Fargo, Twitter, and Nike. I know that the goal of business is to make money while providing some sort of service, and all of the companies I picked get a lot of business for their services, so I figured they were decent investments. As I was thinking about what stocks to buy into, I first thought of companies that I put my money into.
For example, I do spend money at Walmart from time to time, and I know for a fact that millions and millions of people do every single day. It seems as though WalMart will never go out of business, and for that reason, I assumed it was a safe investment. I know I put a lot of money into Nike every year for sports, as do many other athletes, and they have a pretty successful business. I thought about companies that many of friends or people around me use consistently, like Twitter. Twitter has been around for many years and has grown in popularity. I know for a fact that a majority of teenagers use it and like it, so I figured it was a good pick. But there were other companies that I took more a risk with, since I was not as familiar with them, like Wells Fargo and Costco. Costco is not popular in Maine, but I have seen it come up on TV for the daily stocks. I looked at charts and comments, and it seemed to be pretty successful. The last company I invested in was Wells Fargo, which is an international banking and financial service. I consider this the most risky stock I invested in because there have been issues in the past with this company. The only website I relied on was UpDown.com. I looked at the charts and some of the comments in order to make my final decision. I probably should have done more research on the stocks I invested my money in, because if this had been
real money, I know I would have been much more careful and picky. After about a week, my stocks went up a very low percentage of 0.01%.
I did not check my stocks frequently, and I did not participate in every day trading. I basically just left them alone and let the stock market do its thing. I looked at the chart of my performance and at the two week period, my success went down a bit. I started to lose a bit of money here but it was not very significant because I did not buy a lot of shares. I think that the amount of shares I bought from each company was low and that it had an impact on my progress. I did not end up gaining a lot of money, but I also did not lose money in the end. I basically lost the money that I could of gained if I had invested in more shares. Since the election was about to occur during my time on the stock market, I think that it impacted my progress. Donald Trump actually helped out the Wells Fargo stock immensely. Since I had invested in Wells Fargo, it was beneficial to me. A couple of the companies I bought shares from clothing companies, who may have had some new shipments in, and that would have a positive or negative impact on their
business. I would definitely consider investing in the stock market some time in the future, but only if I was in a comfortable financial situation. Stocks are a good investment because you can get a lot of money back, keep up with inflation, and it is better than spending all of your money on pointless things with no value. I sort of like the risk that goes with the stock market and it is fun to physically see your performance go up. I think that investing in stocks in the future would help prevent me from wasting my money on things that I do not need. Stocks also have a positive impact on capital, because the businesses grow without having to borrow from other sources and prevent debt. If I were to have my own large business, I would definitely invest in the stock market.