Me, My Shares Portfolio and OCD Back Together Again at Long Last

So way back in 2007 I started making more money that I needed and was starting to accumulate a little bit. It had taken me about a decade to get to that point and it felt pretty good. So I thought, what can I do with it? Well after a bit of thinking I got to the idea of purchasing some gold. And so I did, apparently in a safe in Switzerland, but I will have to take their word for that as I never actually saw it. A couple of years passed by and it went up and I made a reasonable amount of money but it was a little bit slow going. I loved the free money and how clever it made me feel but I thought, hey I'm a clever chap, I must be able to do more than this. And so I sold it and bought some Shell shares. I remember it distinctly as I used to look at them every day and they would sit around £4.30 day in day out. After about a month of that, I thought, that's even more boring than the gold and I haven't made any money. I thought there must be better opportunities out there. And so I came upon the Aim Market on the London Stock Exchange. Everyone was talking about 10 baggers and 20 baggers and a place where all your dreams would come true as long as you knew what you were doing. Well I liked the challenge of finding out about these microchips and I lived dreaming about how all my troubles would be solved once I'd had a few 10 baggers and I could live on a yacht off Monaco with a laptop and a Martini. Yes that was the sort of person I was really, I knew it deep down and everyone would see me for my brilliance and benevolence. A great fantasy and I loved the idea and the challenge of it all. Time had gone by and by this point it was a couple years after the big crash from the junk bond crisis that totally crashed the Indices and the Bank of England had fired up the old printing press and money was starting to flow into the markets once more. The bankers were told they were very naughty and not to mix up investment with everyday banking again but apart from that, the county would pay for their mistakes so no harm done. Well, I wasn't fully aware that a rising tide lifts all boats and thought I was pretty much a genius as I had made as much money as my yearly salary and all I did was select some shares and sell some shares repeatedly. 

Well I thought, this is the life for me and I left my Director's job at a big Media company to essentially make my money on the markets as I figured I was a bit of a genius underneath it all. I should say as well at this point that I had started dabbling more in spread betting as a way of leveraging what I thought would be winning trades. I remember again distinctly putting my first spread bet on the FTSE and going to have a shower. By the time I came back I was up £400 and I thought, I just can't believe how easy this all is. I was hooked for sure and would become the great trader that I so wanted to be. And so the story goes on and I'm sure you can all the guess the outcome. The outcome was not pretty and involved me self reflecting with about 2 years worth of shame and 10 years in Gambling Anonymous which I was never 100% I needed to be at but it kept me out of trouble and I met some wonderful people there. 

Fast forward to last year and after a fairly unpleasant divorce I was left with extraordinary high debts form paying off my ex and £20k on a solicitor. Its incredible how much money they (the law) can extract from you if you have an ex like mine who took about 5 years to complete the process, of me continually prompting her and ultimately serving her with a court notice to get her to comply with the negotiations that had been settled by both of our solicitors. God knows why she strung it out for so many years, she was the one that cheated and went off with some other guy! Anyway, that's fine, that's what she wanted and I didn't begrudge her a new life but the continual emails, texts, calls, letters from my solicitor cost me a lot as I said and once I had paid her a lump some of cash I was pretty much financially bankrupt. 

So what I did, and bear with me, I appreciate I am taking ages to get to the point I wanted to make at the start! ... was go round all the banks getting the free cash incentives and I put all £1200 of it into a SIPP and got the government cashback of 20% and along with a few train delay repays which I considering also to be free money was starting to accumulate a small bit of wealth. After a year or 2 of boring Gilts, I eventually bought some Lloyds shares and made £800. Eureka, this is how I would pay off my debts, I would make the money on the markets. I soon convinced myself that I was good at it all along and it was only the spread betting that had caused my financial destruction. I was back in but this time I had some rules, the main one being that I wouldn't lose any of my own money that I had made myself. I used another small pension to bulk out my pot a bit and leveraged the free money with that to start making some cash. And it worked well... until ti didn't, but I didn't lose any of my own money. Restarted again last September with a new set of rules and one again I made some good money for a few months, until once again it got flushed away with Trump and his war of choice against Iran.

Are you still here? If so well done, that can't of been easy reading all of that meandering but I wanted to set up what I wanted to talk about. And that is namely, the checking of my portfolio and shares throughout the day. When I just had gilts, if I'm honest with myself I used to check the 10 year gilt price probably 3 times an hour during the day every day. It didn't matter that I had no intention of selling them until I had made some money but check check check. I remember heading to GA and checking the prices just before I went in. Well I thought, its only investing in my pension its not exactly gambling is it. Well maybe it's not but certainly in the very grey area to say the least. And then when I had the Lloyds shares I was checking them maybe 5 times an hour, unless I was working or doing something. 

Well I could just about cope with that but now I have about 6 shares and at points I've had maybe 12 and there is so much checking of the prices to do that it's actually exhausting. I know what I'm doing as well. I'm looking for those tiny hits of dopamine when it's gone up. Obviously I got the opposite hormone flooding into my system when it goes down. Anyway that brings me up to present day and with he turmoil on the markets I am checking checking checking all the time (and generally feeling terrible as the markets are crashing and all my shares are moonshots and so are even more affected).

I've never really told anyone how much I check them but I sometimes it might be every few minutes if I'm on the computer and working. Now in the course of the day that could add up to 80-100 times a day checking. It's a compulsion for sure. Is it OCD.. probably in some form or other. I have spoken a lot about my ROCD on this blog and how my money worries spiral into obsessive thoughts that go around and around until my head feels very squeezed and I can barely stand up straight. It puts me so out of whack at times that when I suddenly have to talk to someone I find it quite difficult to pull my mind back from ruminating about how to get out of my predicament, what to do, what a fool I've been, etc etc...

I wanted to share it because I wondered if anyone else had a portfolio and how many times a day that they checked it. When I first started back I was trading an awful lot too which is a different story but I've pared that right back over the last few months as I've done a lot more research and want to genuinely become part of the story with some of the companies that I am invested in. (Some amazing biotech stories out there. I guess most of them will come to nothing but it would be lovely to be part of a great story that helps mankind and making some money on the way. And of course if I do hit that 10 bagger then I can off my debts and be free of them. 

I have been trying to look at my portfolio less as I know its no good for me and gives me a lot of stress when the markets are crashing but I'm also aware of the comfort of checking. I think it may have something to do with trying to have control in the world. Some sort of structure to sit myself within. That's about as close as I can describe it. I love my shares, I really do apart from when they misbehave and I am aware that it may not be a healthy activity for me but I suppose I have the kind of personality that wants to overcome the gambling aspect of my personality. It is generally believed that that is impossible but saying stuff like that is like a red rag to a bull for someone like me. Impossible? I bet I can do it. Trade and be happy and make money is a lifelong ambition for me. I believed every time I sat in a room telling everyone that I knew I was out of control and I couldn't do it on my own. The pilot light never went out and I know exactly what I sound like but I have to try. I won't lose any of my own money I know that much but I am aware of the mental cost to the checking and worrying behaviors and it can be quite high. Of course on the flip side when its going well I feel the same sense of safety I felt when Rishi Sunak started giving out free money whilst I spent the beautiful spring of lockdown peddling my bike around, listening to birds and smelling the roses (and conveniently putting out the carnage across the world from coronavirus). 

So there it is, checking checking and more checking. My ambition is to go for an hour and then for 1/2 a day and build it out from there. I am nowhere near that at the moment but I believe I can do it. I will update in a few months to document my success or failure. Oh what it is to be human!