About nine months ago, I opened up a couple of online brokerage accounts that were offering free Costco gift cards and $50 for stock-buying just for signing up and investing a little dough.

There they sit, my two empty, lonely accounts, waiting for me to make up my mind and buy something already.

I even have a group of friends who initiated an investment contest this year with the most lax of rules: All I had to do was make an investment of any kind and report its results quarterly. I could invest $5 or $5,000. One friend has a large stake in the Turkish shipping industry. Another has lot a “bundle” in biotech stocks. I could have put $100 in a money market and entered that.
I never did.
You see, I have investor paralysis. The index fund, boring is good, buy and hold philosophy is so deeply enmeshed in my being that I couldn’t begin to decide what to buy.

An ETF? An alternative energy company? Structured notes? A share or two of a blue chip?

I’m no speculator. I’m certainly not a stock picker. If I were to buy individual stocks, my method would be what I like and what I’ve read about in the news, with a little bit of number crunching mixed in. That’s no way to beat Buffett.
Besides, the market is motoring along these days and with my luck, I’d buy at the peak.

For those of you who do own individual stocks, how did you pick them? Did a broker do that for you? Do you turn to shouting stock sages? Do you only own stock of your employer? Do you pore over SEC filings?

This entry was posted on Friday, June 1st, 2007 at 3:58 pm and is filed under investing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.