I’ve been having a long discussion about stocks, ETFs, and mutual funds with my husband.

My background is in Engineering but I love anything to do with numbers specially if I can make money. I started investing on my own about 6 years ago.

The first year, I only invested $2,000 and made a profit of $750 so that’s a 37% return and I was pretty happy with my return on the first year.

Second year, I invested $1980 and made $1700 in profit on a short term and that is an 86% return. I started buying penny stocks. I also started looking into dividends and I was able to made $130 in dividends.

Third year I made $1030 in short term and $3110 in long term so I got a total of $4140 in profit a 54% return and an additional $550 in dividends.

Fourth year I had a profit of $5840 that was an 84% return and an additional $778 in dividends.

Fifth year I made $30,000 that was a 26% return and an additional $1150 in dividends.

Sixth year I was doing great until I started to invest into more penny stocks. I got some crazy returns and I got greedy so I lost a lot of money that year but at the same time since I was taking risks and I was following the news I made more money that I lost so after my huge penny stock failure I still had a 43% return and about $1,000 in dividends.

You will probably wonder how I did it. I pretty much sold everything I had managed by financial advisors and manage my stocks on my own. I also had more money to invest but I felt more comfortable investing more last year than other years because of my lessons learned with penny stocks. These stocks are super volatile so you can either make crazy money or lose a lot of it too or you can just go after a 5% or 10% to play safe and still make good money.

Long story short, I started about a month ago to discuss with my husband about our finances and that I should start investing a little bit more conservative since some days I was really chewing my nails. We also talked about making a challenge, were I would invest aggressively in one account, follow indexes in another one, and go after ETFs and dividends on a third account. So I will create three accounts. The accounts will go live on July 1st and I will post monthly updates of the accounts with charts to compare which type of investing gives a higher return for your money. We will learn together.

Lessons learned, don’t get emotional, buy low and sell high unless you have experience and are ok taking a loss if you are going after earnings. Watch the market, listen to the news and follow prices of commodities.

I literally wake up some days at 2 – 3 am to see how Europe’s market is doing. Asia opens at night. But trust me, you can make good money in a couple of hours if you follow the news.

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