I have jumped the shark on investing

So, a couple of months ago, as I have previously mentioned, I had included a Direct Investing account within my TFSA with an eye on eventually allowing my money to make money for me, rather than me do all the work.

And then I sat on it for a month or two.

Part of the wait was me educating myself by reading what material I could on strategies and how best to capitalize on my investments while I also was watching the market and finding stocks and prices that agrees with me and my investment plans while also getting a better gauge of how things are moving.

Although I may as well be cloud watching for all the good me watching the market did. What people say is true; trying to predict the stock market is like trying to predict the weather: you can make all the necessary precautions against the bad, only to not encounter it.

And then when you least expect it... BAM! Snowmageddon!

The educational material was a little more helpful when they didn't spend too much time speculating the future.

Really the wait was mostly for me to find some courage to step into the uncertainty that is the stock market and having to wrap my head around the fact that I am exposing myself to possibly gambling away my hard earned cash.

I have played stock market games before with the use of fake cash with some success. That success is rooted in the fact that I am at my best when I spend it and forget it, sometimes for months at a time. This allows time to make my earnings grow to a value that I feel comfortable in selling it which allows me to take the value of some stocks that are on the downside in stride as well.

And while not really being in any mood or position (given my student loan debt) to being terribly risky with my money, as I really can't afford to lose all my money on any particular stock, in the same breath, I'm actually pretty comfortable with a moderate amount of risk provided that the portfolio is strongly diversified so as to ride out any potential downturns in particular markets for instance.

That said, I'm not much of a gambler either, so stability is something I value when it comes to me picking stocks.

Knowing all this from my own experiences over several years, I'm attempting to replicate this as closely as possible. That is to say, I want something that is both low maintenance and something I can handle long term that I can reasonably be able to find gains in.

In short, I am looking at splitting my investments between ETFs and a diversified selection of dividend stocks. The ETFs because they are low maintenance, lower costs than mutual funds and they act as a ballast that automatically diversifies a portfolio. The dividends are so that I'm not entirely dependent on the current market returns in order to have accumulated an actual profit from investing in said stocks.

After all, more money is the reason I'm doing this, isn't it?

However, this is going to be a life-long project that I am taking on. To get a portfolio I'm happy with will take an extremely long time. For one, I accumulate real cash at a much much lower rate than I do fake cash. Not only is fake cash easy to earn, I also currently have a debt that I am prioritizing more or less to servicing and being rid of above and beyond any investing I intend to do, because unlike the market, my debt repayment returns are guaranteed.

Also keep in mind that because I pay a $9.99 commission for every bundle of stocks I purchase. Ergo, I don't exactly go about buying stocks one at a time because... well it's a dumb idea and it adds $10 dollars to the actual cost of said single stock. I won't do it. But because that means I need to make those purchases in bulk, at a minimum of 10 stocks a purchase (though realistically I want at least 15-20 stocks purchased per buy), it means I have to save up said money in order to afford my preferred stock of the moment.

There's also the matter of trying not to panic over drops in the market and what have you.

Wish me luck and hope I don't bugger this.