How I Began Building My Portfolio Using the Stash App to Invest in the Stock Market (Part I)

Less than three weeks ago, I’d be the first to tell you I didn’t know anything about the stock market—and I didn’t want to. Investing is for rich people, I would’ve sneered! My small-town family background of generational poverty had taught me to disdain people with wealth or success, writing off the rich as a bunch of scammers, crooks, and sleaze bags, intent on taking advantage of poor people like us.

So how did I end up authoring The Serenity Project—an experiment in winning the wealth-building game? Well… to be honest, it’s a surprise to me. I never thought I’d begin 2021 writing about learning how to invest in the stock market. (You can read more about how it all began, and why, right here, here, and here.)

Long story short, this New Year, I’ve begun using the Stash app for beginner investors. In less than three weeks, it's completely changing the way I think about prosperity, socioeconomic empowerment, and generational potential.

The following is based on personal opinions and personal experiences, and should not, under any circumstances, be considered professional investment advice. Always do your own research before making financial decisions. Please note no views or opinions of the author are endorsed by any other party mentioned herein. (I doubt they even know I exist.)

When I used Stash to buy my very first few fractional shares in the stock market (described here), I had very little… okay, no investing knowledge to speak of. But those first few investments gave me a starting point to begin learning about stocks. With a little practice, I began researching how to make better, wiser investing choices.

After all, as a low-income investor, I don’t have much extra cash to spare. So I don’t want to just throw money away on bad choices. I want to gain the know-how to make careful, informed selections that will put me in the best possible position to see returns, not losses, over the long haul. And my hypothesis is this: If I can figure out how to win the wealth-building game, you can figure it out, too.

Already, my investment strategy has come a long way from just throwing darts at some big-name companies, like I did to begin with. Don’t get me wrong—less than three weeks in, I’m definitely still an amateur. I don’t pretend to have all the answers. I’m just learning as I go.

What’s important to me, which is why I’m sharing all of this, is that... thanks to today’s technology and access to information... anybody can learn the same things I’m learning.

So, in the next few days, I’m going to be sharing three steps I took during the first two weeks of the New Year. These were my beginner steps for building my very first portfolio with the Stash app. Number one, which I’ll talk about today, is certainly not rocket science. But this is ground floor, where I began to get an introductory sense of the industry, and where I started finding my footing to educate myself further. Ready for this? My first step involved...

1. Googling the words hot stocks for 2021.

Yeah, I told you it wasn’t rocket science, right? But everybody's gotta start somewhere. And I'm a staunch believer that the only way we get anywhere is by starting wherever we're at.

Plus... this initial approach brought me to compelling picks like Peloton, Square, Etsy, Teladoc, etc. These are companies that wouldn't come to mind for me on my own because I don't use any of their products or services, but they’re brands I'm familiar with anyway because apparently everybody else in the world does use them.

With this initial step, I learned it turns out beginner-level info about which stocks to watch is not all that complicated, mysterious, or exclusive to the upper crust after all. With plenty of search engine research in the first two weeks of 2021, I was reading enough articles about current stock news and market trends that I was seeing several certain brand names popping up as favorites of multiple experts writing on the subject in January.

So I might not know anything about researching stocks, but I figured learning which stocks the people who do know about researching stocks are excited about… that might lead somewhere. Therefore, as I went clicking from link to link, I made myself a shortlist of the companies I kept seeing highlighted, until I had a decent selection of six or eight I wanted to examine in more detail.

With ticker symbols in hand, then, I did several more rounds of Googling, pulling up performance charts and expert opinions to get a feel for which stocks looked like the best bets. I'm not gonna lie… I had no basis to judge here, except for a mostly uninformed sense of intuition about how well I'd guess these companies might do in the future, from what I understood about their business climates at the moment. Add to that my gut feeling about which direction the zigzags on the charts were trending at the end of a week, a month, a year, five years… call it semi-educated guessing.

In other words, at this point, I still had no real idea which stocks were the best options compared to the others. So ultimately, I read as much information as I could understand, then I picked some of those stocks that sounded good, and I invested a few bucks. Like I said, everybody's gotta start somewhere, and this gave me something to build on.

I know it might not sound like anything to shake a stick at, but if you're like me, and you've never spent any time reading about stock news or market trends before, this is actually a real, practical step into uncharted territory. If you're as new to investing as I am, you might be just as surprised as I was to learn how much information is freely available, if you just make a point to start looking into it.

Next time, I’ll tell you about my second intentional step: exploring the in-app Stash recommendations for diversification, which gave me a much better sense of how to balance my investments to build toward long-term stability and growth.

In the year ahead, I plan to continue writing about my experiences as a beginner investor, using the Stash app to build a portfolio in the stock market. I’m not saying you should do it, too—I’m just gonna try it myself and let you know what happens. I’m learning as I go, so if you’d like to come along for the ride, we’ll be learning together, hopefully doing our small part to turn the tables and win the wealth-building game, for the good of greater society.

Does that sound overly ambitious to you? Maybe we just haven't allowed ourselves to think big enough before.

If you like anything you read here, please share this article with your social media networks to get more people thinking about how we can all start winning the wealth-building game. Like to connect? Drop me a line: jeanmillersays {at} gmail.com.