How I started security trading and failed almost completely

Out of curiosity and eagerness to go into security trading, I didn't even have a second thought. I was a total failure, one reason was the credibility of the company's shares and another reason is the unfavored situation. I did learn a very good lessons from that.

I played with the mock trading using imagination buying and selling shares and recorded in my record book. It did go well and show a green sign of it, it happened like that often and I couldn't much about the risk. I started collecting information to deal with the real trading.

Opening security account wasn't that complicated and hard. I went to my bank which was Hang Sang Bank of HK, it is in Mongkok. I contacted with the staff and told them I would like to open a security account. An adult man in suit came and ask me to fill some forms and had a voice recorded interview asking this and that. And that's it, I got my security account opened.

The next day, I started buying shares excitingly. I cannot remember the name of the first company's share I bought now. It wasn't a big one, it cost 4 point something dollars. I bought 5000 shares that morning. And I was like checking the price of that share the whole day. It fluctuated up and down by only some cents, it was really exciting.

The next morning when the market opened up, my share price went up some more cents and I calculated, I would give me a few hundreds bucks. I exciting sold all shares, and realized that the transaction fees are much more than what I earned. After deduction that minimum transaction fees, I was left with almost nothing. It was crazy! :D

Next day, I didn't even had a second thought or anything, I just got into my laptop and bought another 6000 shares. Thinking I would hold it until I made more money. It passed a few weeks and the markets doesn't change much, it even went down for a few cents. I waited and waited for a couple of more weeks. It was no luck this time.

I started to see the red numbers indicating the dropping of the price day by day. And I realized that it was because of the conflict happened in Egypt that time. There was a political unrest trying to overthrown the government. I learned that an bad situation happened in thousand mines away still affects the market of that small company. The price is down and down, and I got really frustrated.

It went down by about 1 dollar and I sold half of the shares with a lost of 1 dollar per share. I didn't regret though, I was still enjoying it. Another week passed by, and it went down another 1 dollar. I decided to sold the rest half of it incurring a lost of 2 dollar per share. I had a total damage of about 10k HKD.

This happened when I was studying in Hong Kong back in 2010-2011. I drew a conclusion from that lost and told myself I would love to trade again when time comes. That time is when I have a job with a regular pay check and had enough emergency money save up. The extra saving after that would be going into trading.

I learned that you have to have a quite amount of money to follow up or to hold when the bad time comes. And make sure that you have enough to eat to survive that bad time. That shares I bought did rise up to the near price I bought after a about a month. So, if I had enough money to live on, I would have hold it and wait for the good day to come.

I would definitely go into this securities trading again sometimes in my life. I even dream of doing it after my retirement. What would you say? :D