I guess I was sort of an inspiration for 2 of my other friends with limited stock trading experience, as they both purchased some stock as well. After being down on the first day (from what I purchased it at), the stock jumped up over 14% today (including after-hours trading), making me about $230 on my $2,994 invested:

I’d say that’s a pretty good start I have been contemplating selling the shares and then buying again later. I have a feeling there will be a big selloff from the banks and people trying to make a quick buck, which will affect the stock price negatively. Overall I think it’s a safe long-term investment stock, so even with a selloff, I feel that it will stabilize and then start to trend upwards. From everything I’ve read, the opinions about what the stock will do are all over the place. From people saying it will go back down to the IPO price, to others saying it will go up to $70-$90. In reality, the stock market is a gamble. Do as much research as you can, learn what you can, see how news, etc affects other stocks, and use that to make a better judgment with your own stocks. I’m definitely no expert, my overall portfolio is down 30% (before Visa)…but just giving my two cents.

All I know is that I had a hunch about Google when they became an IPO. I put them in my fake portfolio at the $95/share, and now look where they are at. I’ve had Apple in my fake portfolio since their shares were $11.38….I would have a 1071.09% return on that right now! I have the same feeling about Visa, so this time I’m running with it. If you do the same thing, and are new to the market, just make sure you don’t invest more than you can afford to lose.

One other interesting thing I found is that many of the major credit card/bank companies went up pretty big today:

American Express: +9.48%
Discover: +10.26%
Mastercard: +5.75%
Capital One: +7.66%
Citigroup: +10.24%
HSBC: +3.01%
JP Morgan Chase & Co: +9.25%
Barclays: +7.26%
Bank of America: +8.56%

I wonder how Visa helped affect these?

Just curious if any of you guys are investing in today’s Visa IPO? The stock is up 35% from the opening IPO price as of writing this. I just bought $3,000 worth of shares at $59.75…I think the stock has a lot of potential.

I’m curious to know your thoughts on whether it’s a good buy or not…regardless if you invested or not. I’m pretty new to the stock market, so any advice is more than helpful.

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.

Who says bloggers have no media power? Yesterday Engadget single handedly made Apple’s stock price lose $4 billion in market capitalization with just one post. Their story claimed that an internal e-mail to company employees at Apple stated that there would be another delay on the Leopard OS as well as on the much hyped iPhone.

“This one doesn’t bode well for Mac fans and the iPhone-hopeful: we have it on authority that as of today, the iPhone launch is being pushed back from June to… October (!), and Leopard is again seeing a delay, this time being pushed all the way back to January,”

What does news like this do to the stock price?

Apple’s stock dropped from $107.89 to $103.42 in just 6 minutes time. It was later on reported that the story was false, and the stock came back up after about 20 minutes, but it still ended up at a loss ($1.25 billion) by the end of the day. The stock is up today so far.

Engadget stated that the tipster sounded legit, and definitely came from Apple’s internal system. Apple is now on the lookout for an employee that sent out the e-mail.

This just goes to show the power of the media. Here’s to accurate reporting!