How should I go about investing this?

[DWarrior]

Awesome, I hope you got in at the lows of the market, I know it's been crappy for the past few years.

As for poker winnings, I've been re-investing heavily into poker books. I spend about $300 on poker books, and all my friends thought I'm crazy, but it definetly paid off.

I think the moral of your story is that I should have been saving money for the past years [img]/images/graemlins/frown.gif[/img] Bummer...

[gvibes]

Don't invest in stocks if your investment horizon is two years.

[echecboy]

My winners outperform the few losers I have. But I did make some sells that I could have held onto to double or triple the return I did make. Kind of like folding a poker hand and then playing it out to the end to find out you could have wound up with the pot.

Think about your investment horizon. Think far ahead. Maybe 5 or 6 years; until you are 25. I'm looking forward to buying a house sometime with my investments and then turn that around and rent it out. I'm big on investing in things that will make money for me; like poker books! Hope it all goes well.

laters,

[echecboy]

I would stay away from margin for the time being. Most brokerages won't even allow you to trade on margin without having thousands of dollars to back it up. It seems like a great way to make money trading, especially when you know you need to get into a stock but just don't have the money, but your investments better do well or you risk paying the borrowed amount back and some high interest rates. Buying on margin means if you have $10,000.00 the brokerage house is willing to lend you an additional 10G's to invest. They need to make money at some point in this transaction, and charging you interest as you pay it back is how they do it. If your investment flops and you can barely scrape up the cash to pay off the loan, you set yourself up for a huge financial meltdown. Some lessons in this from the stock market crashes... Be careful. I'd stick with your own money for now. You may not even be old enough. For some reason I'm thinking you need to be over 21 to invest on margin, in addition to having a minimum account balance.

laters,