The Average Investor: Loyal3 Update – 6/17/2015
In March of 2014 I invested $60 in the bar and grill restaurant Buffalo Wild Wings using the online investment platform Loyal3. It was an easy way to play around with the stock market as users are able to invest amounts as low as $10 in a variety of big name stocks and pay absolutely zero transaction fees. I even wrote a second post that was supposed to be the first in a series of regular updates to track my portfolio growth as I continued to invest and hopefully made money due to stock market gains.
Honestly, I forgot that the investment was even there.
For some reason it popped into my head the other day, so signed onto my account and took a look at how my small investment was doing. Let’s look at the numbers:
Stock Market
- Dow Jones in March of 2014: 16,457
- Dow Jones as of 6/16 2015: 17,904
- Increase: 8.79%
Investments:
- Buffalo Wild Wings Investment in June of 2014: $60
- Buffalo Wild Wings Investment Current Value: $65.38
- Increase: $8.96%
My investment has done wildly better than a savings account with an interest rate of a fraction of a percent, and has even slightly outperformed the market.
In my first (and only) update post I posed a multiple choice option asking readers to help me pick my next pick. As a result of the feedback I was going to invest $50 in Intel, but I never actually made the purchase. Which may have actually been a good thing since their stock hasn’t done anything in the last year.
I’m ready to continue my investment game here on CleverDude, so I took at look at the available stocks, and decided to invest my $50 in Apple instead. Their stock has seen some decent gains in the last 12 months, and people love their products. As I wrote this post I put in the order to invest $50 in Apple, so I’m on my way again.
Stay tuned for the next update in the middle of July!
How are your investments doing?
Brought to you courtesy of Brock
Brock is a software engineer by day and personal finance blogger at night. He is a fitness junkie and enjoys grilling and smoking meat. Married with two children, Brock strives to improve his skills as a husband and father, and is always on the lookout to stretch his family’s budget as far as he can.
Sounds like a fun game 🙂 My intel stock is up about 65%, but I bought it a couple of years ago… I would recommend investing in broad index funds like the SPY electronically traded fund. You will get a good return on average with lower risk than individual stock investment.
I invest in WMT, MSFT, UL, and KRFT every month using LOYAL3. It is a great way to invest in these dividend payers with small amounts of money without having to worry about paying tons of commissions.
Thanks for sharing!
@Derek – Your gains on your Intel stock doesn’t surprise me if you bought it a couple of years ago. You may be right about your stock advice…..however my little experiment here is to see how well an average guy like me can do with stocks by keeping it simple with a platform like Loyal3. We’ll see how it works out!
@John – Nice to hear from someone else that uses Loyal3!!! Hope your stocks are doing well! 🙂