First time investing.

So today I would like to talk about one of my favorite topics. Investing, particularly investing in stocks and my first tries at it. There are ofcourse many more options to consider when you want to invest your hard earned cash and we will hopefully touch upon these subject later on. However, my choice of poison is investing in stocks. I am fairly new on this and I have had sporatic success/failures with it before. This have luckily changed.

My initial encounter with stocks was when I was young (probably 9-10 years old) and I had recieved some extra cash from relatives during my birthday, we are talking very small sums but in that age and in my head everything over 100 sek = 15 $ made me into a very rich man. My parents wisely told me to invest this money and brought me to the local bank. I can only speculate that the thought proccess of my parents was to teach me how to save money. I sat down with a "bank man", not knowing much about investments or savings in general, asking the nice man to give me some stocks. He kindly told me that buying stocks were expensive and that it was easy for me to lose all my money (scare tactics anyone?) and that I should start with something easier and "cheaper". So he gave me a list of some funds they had, and asked me to pick one or two.

A fund is in simple terms a portfolio of stocks that is owned by many investers and controlled by either a bank or a company claiming to know what they are doing.

I had no idea what to pick, but I knew I wanted something cool. So I ended up with two funds that invested in Russia and Japan. Somehow I thought Russia was on the way up since the fall of Berlin Wall, and a fund investing in Japan just sounded cool. Well, here is where I learned my first lesson, never pick an investment on the basis of it just being cool. The Russian market shoot up during the late 90's and beginning of the 21 century. The fund investing in Japan only made marginal movements. The Russian fund was sold off and allowed me to have some extra cash during my studies at college. The Japanese fund was worth about the 15 $ I put in and with the inflation it was worth actually less then before.

It was during my studies I made the second attempt at investing in stocks. A friend of mine and myself that were studying economy was interested in buying some stocks, which turned into a "get rich quick" plan for both of us. The strategy was more of a daytraders strategy, yet without the hard work of actually investigating the companies we would invest in. No we made the choice yet again in companies that sounded cool and had a history of large jumps in value. I got a company that made digital movies, anyone seen the movie Happy Feet? Absolutely nothing happened to that company. Thinking back, how smart was it to pick a company that was years from releasing a second movie? Not very.... Anyhow, I got bored and figured I could spend the money on drinking/partying more important things, since it was college  my priorities where never really solidified in getting rich. I mean I could always do that "later". So i pretty much lost some money for the transactions and spent the rest on....ehum books....for studies. Atleast that is how I remember it *cough* *cough*.

Today, with EU in risk of heading into another recession, I have invested again. But this time it is not because it seemed cool, or that I want to get baseball rich. My goals and strategies have changed recently and I will talk about this tomorrow.

So how was your first time with investing money? What did you invest in and why? Was there someone telling you to start investing or was it initally you yourself who wanted to invest?