My first year investing was a very bad one for me and a lot of people. Hey, stuff happens (and it happened big time as we all know) and crying about last year losses won’t help my future gains. I finally know the exact amount that I lost, it was quite a learning experience for me that I or my pocket won’t soon forget but that will help me become a better and smarter investor in the long run, I hope. My total losses for 2008 were only $2,217.80 not including all my sweat and tears (tears were added for pure entertainment value) and If I could put a number for those it would be $782.20 for a total of $3,000.00 which ironically is the maximum amount that you can claim as a stock loss on your taxes according to what I’ve read.

My next question for those who have claimed losses before is this, just how much of your money did you get back?, for all I know I could get all of it, some of it or just a tiny, tiny bit of it. I am just going to have to wait and see until i have my taxes done or I can use the Tax Estimator that is available at MSN Money and find out for myself if i am going to be happy or sad come tax time.

pA brand new year is here and the Weekly Investing Report is back with a couple of changes. The new year sure didn’t bring good news for me last week but that is ok, there is plenty of investment weeks to go. My account was down $163.48 for the week but hopefully things will be better this week./p pa href=”http://gainsnlosses.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/01/scottradeaccount40.png”img title=”Scottrade Account (40)” style=”border-top-width: 0px; display: inline; border-left-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px” height=”140″ alt=”Scottrade Account (40)” src=”http://gainsnlosses.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/01/scottradeaccount40-thumb.png” width=”204″ border=”0″/a /p pI had no trades last week./p pMy investments, 50 Dow Chemical Co (DOW) shares and 100 Allied Irish Banks PLC (AIB) shares./p table cellspacing=”0″ cellpadding=”2″ width=”400″ border=”0″ tbody tr td valign=”top” width=”200″Total Money Balance/td td valign=”top” width=”200″$1,923.72/td/tr tr td valign=”top” width=”200″Investment Value/td td valign=”top” width=”200″$1,254.50/td/tr tr td valign=”top” width=”200″Total Account Value/td td valign=”top” width=”200″$3,178.22/td/tr/tbody/table

pThe new year is here and since Los Angeles is the capital of cosmetic surgery, or so I’ve heard, and i don’t want to be left out some minor cosmetic changes are in order for the Weekly Investing Report. Here is the scoop, I am going to add how much money i have available for trading, how much my investments themselves are worth and when you add those two they should give me the total account value, it will look something like what you see below and for the record those are not the actual numbers, just some creative Wall Street accounting. Now if all that you see are a bunch of random numbers and symbols don’t feel bad, it’s because my blog editor is still acting up. /p table cellspacing=”0″ cellpadding=”2″ width=”400″ border=”0″ tbody tr td valign=”top” width=”146″Total Money Balance/td td valign=”top” width=”254″$1,000.000/td/tr tr td valign=”top” width=”146″Investment Value/td td valign=”top” width=”254″$4,000.000/td/tr tr td valign=”top” width=”146″Total Account Value/td td valign=”top” width=”254″$5,000.000/td/tr/tbody/table

pDo you remember a while back when the government was giving away money like it grew on trees?, i do. A few billion here a few billion there and then when the big three asked for a measly 15 billion they said no, they finally got something so lets not feel too bad for them. Anyway, i remember that my friend was taking me home, we work together, and we were discussing the whole thing and at the time we wondered who else was going to go to Washington asking for money but then we thought, hey wait a sec, why don’t we go to Washington and ask for a bailout. We only need $4 million each, i then said to him. “So we go to Washington and ask for the money and then the politicians are going to say to us, sirs we don’t have any more money but we sure have the bill for you”, we bursts out laughing and to this day it still makes me laugh because it’s true, all of us are going to end up paying for all those bailouts and suddenly i don’t feel like laughing anymore, so sad./p