Today I’ve officially turned a 1/4 century old, as I am celebrating my 25th birthday. I’ll be going out to Sakura Steakhouse for dinner and Union Jacks for a little after-dinner drinking. Crystal will be coming into town as well, so it should be a great time!

On another side-note, all of the stocks I own are doing awesome today:

The obvious big hitters from today are Intuit and CNet. Intuit is doing good (finally!) because of an excellent 3rd quarter and raised outlooks from analyst firms. Intuit is the #2 highest gain stock today behind aQuantive, which you may know in the online advertising world for their Atlas ad serving technology. Microsoft picked them up today for $6 billion, a huge amount more per share then they are worth…and this jumped their stock almost 80% today. CNet is doing good because of analysts at First Albany reiterated their “buy” rating, and raised their target price from $10 to $11.

I got into stocks at first just as a forced way to learn more about the market. I only invested a small amount into one stock, but this pretty much forced me to watch it, and learn what affects the share price and many other things just from having to be more involved. The key to this is only to invest what you can afford to lose. Since then I have picked up a few other stocks, and although I had a great day today, overall I am still down. The main reason was from that original first stock (AMD), which lost over 60% of its value at one point. Overall I am down 7%, but things are looking better, and my other stocks have helped offset the loss from AMD. Now I understand when they say to diversify your portfolio.