Welcome to Women Take Stock! 

We are four friends with not a business degree among us. We are  newbies in stock investing, but we are wading knee deep into this territory where women are underrepresented.

Join us each week as we dive deep into a topic, whether it’s How to Research a Stock, What Makes an Expert, The Psychology of Trading, or What The Heck Is Cryptocurrency, Anyway?

We'll do a reveal on our own portfolios, the companies behind them, and why we decided to invest in each. We have fun at our own expense - our own literal expense, sometimes.

We hope you’ll be entertained and soak up some trading intel as we venture along the path to changing our own financial stories.

Welcome to our premiere episode, in which four friends:  A. Say hello!  B. Fess up to ignorance... and wisdom! C. Talk about one of the most taboo subjects among friends... money! & D. Establish a few challenges for the weeks to come. 

In today's episode we talk about what makes an expert and, you know, how to differentiate expertise from, say, mansplaining. Who should we believe?  Who should we trust when we're trying to figure out how to invest? Because, really, at the end of the day, is there a difference between investing in the stock market based on the so-called "experts" or from fortune tellers? Should we just pull a few tarot cards to get some guidance on how to invest? We put it to a (very unscientific) test. 

Sometimes it really does seem like the stock market has a mind of its own. But we know better than that, right? Our minds are the ones that actually move the markets. That’s both a good and bad thing; we are human, after all. We all know that the human mind can get fogged with all sorts of nuttiness. So what sort of psychological make up makes for better stock pickings? The good news? Women investors on average tend to perform better than men. The bad news? We can get in our own way. Today, we have a special interview with MarketPsych’s Frank Murtha, a psychologist who is an expert in behavioral finance and the author of the book MarketPsych: How to Overcome Fear and Build Your Investor Identity, and we learn a mind game or two that could help strengthen our positions. 

In this episode, we try to get a handle on something that can be hard to handle. The market stock market can dive and jump and it can feel like we have no control over it. It's like a bull and a bear having a fight up and down and all over the place. Do you want to try to get in there before they can find some peace? Maybe, maybe not. But these days, with the market swinging like a gorilla on a tire, hanging from a tree at the zoo is definitely a question we want to explore, because as a beginning investor, it can be hard to look at those jagged up and down graphs and know whether to buy, sell, or hold.  

Enjoy our last minute holiday spectacular in which we kiss (actually, kick) 2020 goodbye. Or, maybe we should call it a holiday hang out. We need to manage expectations, right? No singing and dancing here. Instead, in this episode we check in with each other to assess what we've learned about stock investing (and cryptocurrency!), how far we've come, and make a few predictions for 2021. 

This week, we are going to take a look into our crystal ball and explore the future of money. Okay, that’s a bit of a stretch. We don’t have magic powers. If we did, we’d just look up next week's lottery numbers and be done with it. But the truth is, there are plenty of people who are adamant that the future of money isn’t green paper; they say it looks more like 1s and 0s. Which makes sense because when’s the last time any of us used cash?

So, we are going to try to wrap our heads around cryptocurrency, which the New York Times once called “the crazy cousin of traditional currency.  Some people say the entire future of finance is heading down the crypto path and people and even banks and some governments are signing on for the ride… while others say it is totally insane and —- Warren Buffett even called it “demented”  — so there’s that. 

But whatever happens in the future, we’re intrigued and want to know more!  It's complicated stuff…luckily we have a special guest — the crypto-educator Lori Souza of the YouTube channel The Innovative Economy. She does a  very good job of making this otherworldly sounding currency into something a bit more relatable.

Happy New Year! It’s tike to Take Stock! 

The beginning of the year is always “new year, new you,” as if you are supposed to use this opportunity to make over your entire self, as if your entire self needs making over. Forget about that.  We’ve decided that rather than worry about losing 10 pounds or working out an extra 10 minutes a day,  the most important makeover for each of us this year will be a financial one. Because if we put as much time into thinking about our finances every week (or even every day) as we do worrying about some of the other things that women are constantly told they need to worry about, then we would be in a much better place financially. Probably. 
So join us as we take stock of the year that was and plot ahead with the year that will be.