My Stock Market Experience

Dr. E.C. Fulcher, Jr

My stock market experience began in 2003. I was driving home from Atlantic City after playing Blackjack in Trump Plaza Casino, and had won a few hundred dollars, as I had in the past. On the way back home, I decided, “Why should I spend time here, trying to win money? There has to be a better way”. So, I decided to learn something about the stock market because, in my view, the stock market was the same as gambling. You are not sure what is going to happen; you are taking a chance.

I started looking into the stock market and finding some stocks that I could watch. I knew from my martial arts experience that you need to study your opponent, find out his characteristics, the things he likes to do, and does not like to do. I applied this principle to the stock market.

I picked out about ten stocks that I knew nothing about. Most of them were low-end stocks, and some were penny stocks. For about three months, I watched their characteristics when they went up and when they went down. After learning the habits of some of the low-end stocks, I took three thousand dollars that I had and put it in the stock market. I began to play some low-end stocks, and some penny stocks.

For about a year, I just sort of stayed even. I would win a little bit and then turn around, wind up losing it, but I stayed true to the course. A lot of those stocks I cannot even remember what they were now. I did make some money with (XLE, FCX,} and stocks like that, and then I would also lose some.

One day I read an article about the Federal Government at the Aberdeen Proving Ground that had just signed a contract with a company for a chip to be put in your hand that could be scanned. So, I read the article and found out the name of the company, then went to the stock market page and found out what the sign was. At this point, I do not remember what the company was; it was something like (AUDO).

I took the three thousand dollars and bought as much of that stock as I could. I knew I was taking a chance because I had not studied this company, but I figured it might go up since the government had just signed a contract.

I purchased around one thousand shares of this stock; and went to bed that night, hoping for some good results. When I got up the next morning, overnight, I had made the largest amount of money I had ever made in the stock market up to that point. I had made seven thousand dollars in one night!

I was extremely excited, jumping around the house whooping and hollering because that was a large amount of money for me, and I was incredibly happy about it. I stayed in it for a few more days, and it went up a little bit more, so I wound up making about seventy-five hundred dollars; I sold it and took that profit. That left me with about ten thousand dollars to work with now.

Over the next couple of years, I played those ten thousand dollars and hoped I would have another big windfall, but at that time, I did not have another big windfall again. I made a little bit of money, and then I would lose a little bit of money.

I then started looking at some penny stocks around 2007 and started investing in them. I liked it at first because you could make a great deal of money amazingly fast on a penny stock, but you could also lose it just as fast.

In 2008 I bought three hundred thousand shares of a penny stock, and in a period over three days, watched it go from six cents to ninety-seven cents. I had made one hundred and seventy-four thousand dollars in just a few days.

Of course, I was excited about that. I remember sitting at my computer and saying, “Should I sell, or should I not sell?” I convinced myself on that day that it had gone to ninety-seven cents, and I believed it was going to go three cents higher. At a dollar, I was going to sell, and that would be three hundred thousand dollars that I would make. So, as I was watching it, it went to ninety-eight cents, and I thought it was going to keep going up. Then it went to ninety-seven cents, then to ninety-five cents, then to ninety cents. I remember thinking that I was starting to lose, but I was going to stay in it because I thought it would come back. It kept going down. It went down to eighty cents, and I wondered what was happening. I was losing money, and the one hundred and seventy-four thousand that I was making was going down. However, being inexperienced and not knowing a lot of things, I stayed in, believing it was coming back. It went all the way down to about twenty cents, and I lost all the money that I had made.

That happened to be the same day that the stock market crashed. So, while I am sitting there watching, hoping it was going to go back up, Wall Street and the stock market was crashing in the worse scenario since the great depression. So, because of the bankers and the big companies failing on that day, I lost the entire one hundred and seventy-four thousand dollars, and I was back to the original amount that I had invested of three thousand dollars. I, like many others , was totally wipe dout in one terrible afternoon and not even of my own making

I was devastated, angry, and upset. Even though it was not my fault directly, I was still angry about it. Then when I found out that it was the stock market’s fault, I was agitated at that. However, technically, I should have sold when it was at ninety-seven cents, but I did not.

After that, I took the three thousand dollars and went back to investing in small companies, and over some time, I made it back to five thousand dollars. I went back to my system of studing the charistics of each stock and stayed with that plan. Then one day, my girlfriend at the time was watching the  investment CNBC Maria Bartiromo (before she went to Fox), and she heard about a company in China that was China’s equivalent of America’s Google, and it was doing very well. I watched it for a month and pick up on it’s movements. I took my five thousand dollars, and I invested in a company called BIDU. To my surprise, my portfolio began to rise because BIDU went way up, and I made some money.

This time I wisely sold it at a reasonable profit and did not yield to greed, hoping it would go higher.

I then studied it over the next three months, learned its characteristics, learned what its bottom was, learned what its top was. I would buy back in and let it go to its top and sell and wait for it to go back down. Sometimes when I would sell and make a profit, I discovered that if I had stayed in another week, I would have made more because it would go up higher. However, I now had learned patience and not to be greedy, so I was happy with whatever profit I made, and I would wait until it went back down.

Over a period of months, I built up through BIDU, too twenty thousand dollars. Now I had a little bit more money to work with, so I started watching higher-end stocks. For example, I started watching AutoZone (AZO). Though I invested in AZO, I never made much money in AZO. AZO became an essential part of my portfolio planning because, to my amazement, what I discovered about AZO was, when the stock market went up, AZO went down. Then when the stock market went down, AZO would go up. I thought that was odd, but it is still true today. I used that as a gauge to watch AZO to get a feel for when the stock market was going to go down.

In the process of that, I began to invest in medical companies. One of the leading companies I got connected with was ISRG. It was a good solid company, and it was a low-end stock at that time, down in the thirty-dollar range, which was kind of big because I was used to low-end dollar and two-dollar stocks. If the dollar stocks went up by ten or twenty cents a day, that was big. ISRG sometimes would go up ten or even fifteen dollars a day.

I took all the money I had made from BIDU, and I invested in ISRG. In the meantime, I was still watching 10 other stocks to see what their characteristics were. After I learned the characteristics of some of the higher-end stocks that were anywhere from ten dollars a share up, over a period of time after I learned ISRG’s habits, I discovered how to make a lot of money. I made a tremendous amount of money in ISRG, BIDU, SYNA, and BABA. I even made some money in CHNR and believe it or not, WWE. I did not stay in WWE very long because, by that time, it was not high end enough for me, and I did not like its characteristics.

I stayed with that plan for the next few years, ISRG, BIDU, BABA, and occasionally XLE and FCX. I ran my portfolio up to fifty thousand dollars, mainly because I bought and sold stocks not based on greed and trying to make the most money. My plan and philosophy changed to just making some money and being happy with what the money that I made.

For example, sometimes I would buy ISRG, and I would make a profit of twenty-five to thirty thousand, and then I would sell it. A couple of times after I sold, it would go up even higher, and if I had stayed in, I would have made eighty thousand. Yes, I was disappointed, but I was not that upset because I was contented to make the twenty-five to thirty thousand.

Over the years, I continued this process with all the stocks, and learned patience, learned planning, learned strategy, watched the characteristics of stocks, and made my judgments based on this. I even discovered a German company whose letters were CVAC and made quick money on that company by learning its characteristics and doing the same thing and being able to buy large amounts of shares though it was a lower end stock in the thirty-five to forty dollar range. I was able to buy enough shares that every time it went up by a dollar, I would make six to ten thousand dollars. I made surprisingly good money on that stock.

To the point that I took the three thousand dollars from 2008 that I wound up with, and now today, through careful planning, not through greed, I built my portfolio up to over four hundred thousand dollars, soon to be a half a million dollars, just by going with these companies, sticking with the same ones over the years, learning their characteristics ! It took from 2008 until 2020 to accomplish this! Realizing every once in a while their characteristics would change. In other words, they would go up high, and they would not go back down; they would go higher instead. Then they would come back down to the former high. That meant that their characteristics had changed, and I had to learn them all over again.

So, from time to time, you must make adjustments that the bottom is no longer the bottom; what was the high is now the bottom. Once I learned how to do that, I have been remarkably successful, very blessed to where I have made more money in the stock market now than I have made anywhere else.

Previously, the largest amount of money that I had ever made in one day was when I was in martial arts.  I have fought several fights in martial arts.  I also was a tournament promoter “ The Maryland Expose’  Championships. I made seventeen thousand dollars in one day in martial arts, but now in the stock market, sometimes I make thirty  thousand dollars in a day. By not being greedy and staying in too long, I did not lose that often; I mostly gained.

I still hold with that philosophy and planning today, and hope to continue to build my portfolio if I can use good judgment.

I did all of this without any official training in the stock market. When I started in 2003, I knew absolutely nothing. I did not know how to buy or sell, or even how to get involved. I got involved with TD Ameritrade and its platform. They were a great asset to my learning. I was self-taught, probably made many mistakes, maybe still make a lot of mistakes, but I have at least learned how to minimalize them and now make a profit.

In the last few years, since 2016, my profit margin has gone up remarkably high because the stock market is booming, and I sure hope that it continues to do so.

No one else will ever know the impact and drama of this story, but I will because I lived it. I, who grew up in extreme poverty, had nothing. When I became an adult, the first thirty years of my life were in extreme poverty, and I had nothing. Now to be able to do this just by working at the computer and studying has been a great blessing, and I hope I am able to maintain it.