So apparently someone at Motley Fool was impressed enough with my writing to hire me on as a freelance stock analyst! My first article (that might seem a little familiar for anyone who is a tradingcommonsense.com regular…) was published yesterday here:
http://www.fool.com/investing/general/2014/05/01/is-it-time-to-own-china-in-your-portfolio.aspx
and my second article was published today here:
And, for the record, I will take full credit for the 6% spike in MPEL today. All that buying is certainly a result of the compelling case I made for MPEL yesterday on fool.com!
Getting hired by Motley Fool is pretty exciting to say the least, especially since I have learned a lot about the stock market over the years from Motley Fool. Lots of the contributors on the site are not professional traders, which might be scary to some. However, I really like that part about Motley Fool. Wall Street can seem so intimidating and inaccessible to the average person when all of the articles and books about the market you ever read are written by Harvard MBAs and professional fund managers.
There are certainly some geniuses out there that make money in the market because they programmed algorithms that use quantum physics theories to recognize trading patterns in the market. But for the rest of us, the most important requirement to be a successful trader is common sense. Of course you need to be educated about the market, but you don’t need a degree in finance or 10 years of experience working on a trading floor. Some of the smartest people I know are not investment bankers. They are teachers, small business owners, engineers, mechanics, and salesmen. At Motley Fool, you get to read perspectives of different types of people. And I believe that the best way to truly understand something is to look at it from many different perspectives.
So to recap: I was hired by the Motley Fool, and then I decided to make my next post almost entirely about how the Motley Fool is great. And I didn’t even mention how delicious their Kool-Aid is!
I don’t have a degree in finance; I have a degree in neuroscience. You don’t have to predict what stocks will do if you can predict what traders will do and be one step ahead of them. I made a 400% return in the stock market in five years using only basic principles of psychology and common sense. Want to learn more about how I did it? Or maybe you just want to be able to look sophisticated in front of your coworkers when they ask you what you are reading on your Kindle, and you’d prefer to tell them “Oh, I’m just reading a book about stock market analysis,” rather than the usual “Oh, I’m just looking at pics of my ex-girlfriend on Facebook.” For all these reasons and more, check out my book, Beating Wall Street with Common Sense, now available on Amazon. And of course tradingcommonsense.com is always available on your local internet!
