If you have limited funds and are just picking up a stock here or there, my utterly unqualified advice (if you like extremely high risk) is to buy the things you think are genuine quality, especially if it pays a dividend. Some classics (may or may not have dividends) are things like Costco, Apple, Home Depot. Also, is there anything in-particular you know or follow that might be available for trading?

For example I follow some dorky ass tech-youtubers, and I watch the products stuff pretty religiously. I was able to catch AMD when it around $20 (like 2017), because I was following the industry and the news, and when the threadripper/ Zen architecture came out and kind-of shocked the community. It was like, some “wow” level performance, and I picked up some shares. I didn’t do any crazy technical analysis. I just thought “Wow I want one of those crazy threadrippers. I’m a people. I bet other peoples do too!”. That ended up being a five bagger. When ARM went live earlier this year, I bought that as well. Its had some ups and downs since Intel kind-of shit in the microprocessor pool, but its still been a good ROI (it was a 4 bagger for a minute, now its down to a 2 bagger).

The real challenge on trading or buying and holding on limited funds is that, well, good shit is more expensive. Thats kind-of how the market works. Quality stocks that go up and to the right are expensive.

So some dont’ s that I learned (and I started with just 1’s and 2’s of stocks; literally was putting in $20 a week).

Don’t buy cheap shit just because you get “lots” of it. Its cheap for a reason. Try to think in dollars not shares.

Stop touching things. Or at least, understand, for yourself, why you are doing this. It can really turn into an addiction and you absolutely will lose all your money just fucking around moving shit. The apps are engineered to turn your money, into their money. The person giving you market isn’t your friend, they are your opponent. Company’s like Schwabb, Robinhood, fucking all of them are literally selling the information in your account to high frequency traders. Payment for order flow is why they are letting you trade for free. Keep that in mind. The app wants to turn your money into their money.

And if you are just doing this for fun, then have fun and lose money. Its a blast to ride a 20x option. I’ve watched 2k go to 50k, then to 10k, then 0 in like, minutes because who the fuck know why. But its a fucking emotional roller coaster. Know for yourself why you are doing this thing.

Three, have a plan. This plan needs to be like a story. It should have a beginning, a middle, and an end. Like, get a rubber duck and tell it a story of why it makes sense to do what you are thinking of doing (be-it buying or selling a position). Don’t lie to yourself about why you want to do some thing. Why are you entering a position? What are you going to wait for while you are holding that position? When will you leave that position? Whats the plan?

Fourth, have a schedule (kind of feeds into point #2). Don’t check this thing every fucking day or every hour. Have a day of the week where you are going to check in on things (or a time of day). I say this because intra versus inter day trading can really fuck with your perception. When I was day trading, I would get up early to be ready for opening bell and only trade the first hour. This was incredibly emotionally stressful and I hated it. I ended up moving to a time zone where I couldn’t accommodate that, so I started only trading in the last hour. I buy completely different stocks with a totally different strategy now.

If you are looking for something extremely passive, you might just buy SPY until you feel like you’ve really got enough to do something interesting to you.