This year, I’m going to be participating in the Grow Your Dough Investing Challenge. Jeff Rose from Good Financial Cents reached out and wanted to have an investing competition – both to highlight how easy it is to get started investing, but also to see which financial blogger was the best investor.
The throw down is this: we each invested $1,000 into a brand new brokerage account starting today, January 1. On December 31, we will see who has grown that account the most.
My Strategy
First, I want to highlight that investing should be a long term strategy – not something like this. This is a throwdown, and participating in throwdown will not help you achieve your long term financial goals. Instead, use a strategy of long-term buy and hold and building a diversified portfolio to invest for the long haul. If you want to learn more about long term investing, check out my Investing 101 page. If you do want to trade, limit it to 5% or less of your portfolio.
For this competition, I asked on Facebook a few weeks back what you’d like to see me do. In the end, I decided that I’m going to be taking a position trading strategy. This means that I will be buying individual stocks for a duration of time, usually ranging from 1 week to several months. My stock picks will revolve around earnings announcements and IPOs. These events typically yield more volatility in stocks, which allows for this type of trading strategy to pay off in the short term.
Accountability
A key part of this throwdown is going to be transparency and accountability. Each month, I will check in with you and share what I’ve done, and where I stand. Jeff will be compiling all the stats on his site, Good Financial Cents, and show which blogger has returned the most.
The only rules we have are as follows:
- You start with $1,000 on January 1
- You can invest any way you want, but no margin is allowed
- You can buy and sell as much as you want
- You need to publicly write a blog post about what you bought
- Track your return and report it
I will be sharing what I bought each month and my return for you guys to see. I’ll also share any insights as to why I bought what I did, why I sold what I did, and anything else that happens.
If you want more insights on my day-to-day strategies, and that of The College Investor community, I suggest you read the comments and share an idea of your own.
Here’s where I stand on January 1. I opened an account at Scottrade last week, and funded it a few days ago:
Follow Along
If you want to follow along, simply open a Scottrade account and join in the fun! If you don’t know where to start, check out my Investing 101 Course, where you can learn how to get started in the stock market. You can also check out my 5 Ways to Learn How To Get Started Investing in the Stock Market.
Readers, do you have any tips on what I should invest in?
Robert Farrington is America’s Millennial Money Expert® and America’s Student Loan Debt Expert™, and the founder of The College Investor, a personal finance site dedicated to helping millennials escape student loan debt to start investing and building wealth for the future. You can learn more about him on the About Page, or on his personal site RobertFarrington.com.
He regularly writes about investing, student loan debt, and general personal finance topics geared towards anyone wanting to earn more, get out of debt, and start building wealth for the future.
He has been quoted in major publications including the New York Times, Washington Post, Fox, ABC, NBC, and more. He is also a regular contributor to Forbes.