pete's investment profile

Some of my investment interests and background will give one a feel of "where I'm coming from." My investment exsperience spans over 5 decades. This covered most areas of stocks, derivatives, bonds and mutual funds. The most concentrtation and success was in sector mutual funds and the last 5 years the emphasis switched to individual stocks for more excitement through volatility. My biggest success was sector funds were about 9 of the 10 years had gains over 22% but that included the booming bubble years. The closest to being a professional investor was passing the Merrill Lynch broker exams and having a desk at one of their offices as an active option and stock individual investor for a year. My focus has consistently been small cap and tech stocks where the action is rampant and at times wild. My tendency is to be fully invested and ocassionally to short stocks. Mine is a short term time frame of weeks or a few months at most. Without being paranoid my MO is more of a momentum swing investor willing to take 20 to 40% profits any time it occurs. I have used margins for brief periods and have sworn off that and more so buying stock options. I have never done commodity or currency trading and have no intentions to do so. One must know themselves and develop their own style and stick with some plan. Derivatives is such a large part of the money flow that one should mention writing options is conservative and has little resemblance to the speculative buying of options. The total number of hours I've spent investing, to my wifes displeasure, is over 100,000. Wow! that's like over 4100 fulltime days. Perhaps my excuse for this effort is that this is educational as I have researched many hundred of subjects and 1000s of stocks or mutual funds involved in many countries, wars, depressions, tradegies and success stories. To most of my family and friends this makes me more of a boring one trick pony rather than an intelligent interesting old investor. I have never apologized for my devotion but have struggled with giving more to my family and friends which is the most important to me. There are no golden rules that apply for everyone but protecting what you got is the close to being a universally correct approach. One goal that I use is not to be addicted nor become paranoid as one can not believe much of what is popular in the news media. It is a challenge to trust people when one is betting money aagainst the investor on the other side of a trade. I have done 10s of thosusand of investment transactions amounting to a total gross transactions of many millions of dollars but I still like people, my family & friends and will continue to invest but with a lot less time than in the past. My blogging is for fun with the hope of engaging other Maverick investors with similar traits and interests as mine. I encourage others to comment regardless of their differences.`