August when I started up again.Ā I struggled for a few months, playing my old, out-dated style until:
1) I started reading these boards daily and understood that stocks moved because of the news posted here (strangely, I didn't read the boards for news before then...I would only go off of aggregator sites like Dark Horizons or Yahoo's movie website, so I was always behind the curve).
2) point 1 led me to bookmarking and then rss feeding the news source sites so that I could be a step ahead of the curve
3)I started being an active day trader as I came to understand that "buy and hold" was not the strategy to make money; part of the reason why I'd stayed away for 10 years was because everytime I looked at the port, I just saw a sea of red as all the old stocks that hadn't delisted were just slowly bleeding away. As I began day trading, I converted my port to having a larger balance of shorted stocks.
4)And then the game changes came into play last winter, and I was able to see better strategies and actually invest all of the cash that had accumulated in my account.
5)I think the last piece was trying to figure out what all the complaining about "reset trading" was, and what was causing stocks to trend up or down for the day outside of news stories. So I took the time to stay up past midnight PST and figure out how reset trading worked, and eventually I got the hang of it. And that's pretty much when my run started this past Spring.