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I began buying single stocks in January of 2008, which means it’s been a little over a year now. I started buying them before the meltdown, and continued buying each month no matter what. Essentially I have bought very small amounts of a LOT of different stocks, stretched out over the past 15 months.

I bought high for the first half of that period, and low for most of the second half. I haven’t sold a single share, not even my shares of FRE (which are now worth about a trip to the movies.) I did think about selling FRE to take the (huge!) loss, but held off because I already have a loss to take from something unrelated.

I was looking at my stocks (like I do everyday) and decided on a whim to sort them by Gain %. (Loss % might have been a better word for it though.) As of the day this was written, it turns out that 16% of my stocks do have a gain. The other 84% have a loss. That seems kind of sucky, if you ask me, but does it mean that I’m terrible at picking stocks and should hang it up?

I’m not sure.

The Dow is down 44.02% over the exact same time period that I’ve been investing. Almost all of my stocks are traded on the NYSE (only 4 are from the NASDAQ) so the Dow is probably a fairly reasonable benchmark to compare against.

So what percentage of my stock picks are doing better than down 44.02%?

74% of them.

And of course 26% did even worse than the Dow, with enormous losses percentage-wise. (And in one case, dollar-wise too.)

Overall, I’m down about 33-34%, including the trading fees so far. (Of course there will be more fees when I actually sell something.)

So I’m still not sure, but I’ll keep at it. Besides, I enjoy it, and I’m learning.

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