I'm a positive person. I always try to look on the bright side. "It'll all be fine" sums up my outlook in life. When it comes to people, more specifically, strangers... I try not to judge a book by it's cover. But you never know what someone is capable of just by looking at them. So why do I keep going on vacation with strangers?

I bought KERX @ $4.82 - but it went down. I should have cut losses, but I decided to go on a vacation with this stock. When it went lower, I added to my position. Eventually I had my entire account into KERX at an average of $4.55 - The stock went all the way down to High 3's.. and it hurt. But we were on vacation, so I stuck around hoping we'd come back home. Earnings came out and we beat revenues. Our vacation took a journey up to $5.50 at one point. Dropped back down to Low $5's where I took my profits.

I made a few other trades after, jumping in and out. My profits were $6,100ish in total. It looked sexy to see those gains in just a couple of weeks on a $35,000+ account.

ERII  murdered earnings, after just landing a huge contract a few weeks prior. The spike was nice and I bought end of day on the dip $1 off off it's highs. The setup was nice and it went hand in hand with the analysis I had been studying. If you're following the stock, you know what happened. It didn't bounce the next morning. But I didn't follow the GOLDEN RULE of cutting losses quickly. I saw a loss of $1,200+ on the trade and decided to hangout a bit until I got to break even. Days to follow, I saw my loss on the trade go lower and lower. Nice to meet you $3,000 in losses, and $4,000 in losses. It was frustrating, but I kept my cool and hung out. I'm playing with my profit money anyways, right? So I've been on vacation with ERII thinking, it's going to have a nice day soon. I'll start cutting losses once we see a strong day. There's no chance this vacation is getting close to $7 a share.

I just sold all 5,000 shares for $7.10 today. OUCH.

 

Now instead of being up any money, I'm down $1,300+ of my own money. All because I wanted to hang out and go on vacation with stocks I don't even know. You don't go on vacation with strangers, do you? Why did I trust this damn stock?

I got lucky when I went on vacation with KERX. I was happy and excited about the vacation we took and the profits I made. But now I realize KERX hustled me. It instilled a false sense of confidence in me that ERII was going to turn around just for me at some point. Are these two stocks working together? I don't even know these stocks, they're complete strangers. Why did I trust them?

I'm disgusted with myself. I could have held onto ERII a bit longer and salvaged an extra $1,000 before selling. But I got out because I'm tired of taking vacations with strangers. I was so afraid to lose $1,200+ when the trade first started heading south that it cost me $7,300+ in the end.

 

In the future, I'll shake a strangers hand. Maybe some small talk. I'll spend a little bit of time with a stranger, so long as I'm not put into a position of danger. Spending too much time with strangers, or giving strangers too much control is never a good idea.

When it starts to look dangerous, I'm cutting strangers loose. Bye Bye Buddy, nice to meet you! I'm disgusted with myself. My parents raised me better than this.