Random investing story: a few years ago, my buddies and I used to write random blog posts about stuff we bought and then linked them to Amazon.

A few articles did well via SEO and the site started to make $20, $30 bucks per month. Some months, we even cleared $100...

We decided to use Robinhood, which was sorta new at the time, to buy high yield dividend stocks so we could keep reinvesting and grow our little snowball. Stuff like $NRZ and $PGZ

The goal? Make enough in 10 years to fund a vacation for us and our families.

Over a 4-year period, we invested nearly $3,500 into various stocks. Over $800 of that was reinvested dividends.

When the pandemic happened, many div stocks cut their dividends and also tanked in value.

At the same time, I had become more interested in researching & buying growth stocks. I thought we could do better with bolder bets.

My friends and I agreed to cut our losses, sell off the div stocks, and reallocate our $$ into growth stocks.

So in Sept, I sold all the positions, most of them at a loss, and had about $2,600 to spend.

I looked around for ideas and screened for companies I typically didn't invest in personally (tech, ecomm, cloud, media - check out some of my holdings here: https://www.peterkang.com/stock-investing/ )

I initially picked $NVTA which sounded promising with their medical genetic testing innovations and $XPEL which sells pain protection products for cars. These sounded like companies that could keep growing for the next 10+ years.

I also rolled the dice with $KBNT, a tiny ad tech company that perhaps could scale like $TTD or not. Just felt like being speculative.

After making the bets, I didn't look for 3 months and then finally checked on them today. Results were pretty

Up 75% for a gain of nearly $2k on my $2.6k investment. Not bad!

Obviously a long way to go to pay for any multi-family vacay though, but a good start.

If you're curious about the blog that started all this, it's called Buys with Friends. Haven't been updated in a while, but still pulls in a few bucks. When I have enough, I'll add a few more shares of something new.

https://www.buyswithfriends.com/ 

Thx for reading this random story!