How do I learn how to play this game?
I'm trying to figure that out as well. I am new to what we do here, which I will call "swing trading". Maybe somebody else will give it another name.
It came up that people were following recommendations of for instance, on twitter, of StockSwingAlert. He claims that he focuses on undervalued, and to be honest, a lot of his recommendations are just companies that lose money. It's hard to undervalue that. But FWIW I try to watch and buy some of the stuff, if I like it, and for the most part it's gone up a lot. Keep in mind here that:
1. If enough people follow him, then it has to go up, at first. That's the "pump" part.
2. He might not say when to sell. And I don't know either.
Emotionally, it's hard to compare this sort of thing (which is high stakes gambling) to, say, investing in a really good mutual fund. By really good I mean volatile; it would be even dumber to try to compare it to a dull mutual fund.
Before I started trying to play this game, I spent about a year learning about options in great depth. Options are a negative sum game, but they are very volatile so you can get there (wealth or ruin) faster. By contrast, I have done nothing to learn "charting" and I don't really want to. At some point this becomes a job, and you might as well just work and get paid if you're going to work at this.
