The Frequently Asked Questions

Active investing can feel intimidating at first—especially if you have never placed a trade before.

Here are some of the questions I hear most often about getting started, following the alerts, and making this process fit into your life.

I would say, start smaller than you think you need to.

You do not need a large account. You can begin with an amount that feels manageable and place one very small trade.

The purpose of your first trade is not to transform your financial life overnight. It is to learn how the process works.

Even when the initial dollar gains are small, the percentage return—and the skill you are developing—still matter. If a $1,000 account gains $100 in a year, that is a ~10% annualized return. The $100 may not feel life-changing yet, but you are learning how to make money with money.

As you add savings and reinvest your gains, the dollar amounts have the potential to grow—that is the flywheel effect.

Many subscribers actually do have an existing relationship with a financial advisor. But that delegation can often leave them feeling disconnected from their money and their investments.

If you’re curious about trading and investing, it can absolutely make sense to open a small investment account. Again, the gains and losses in that account are unlikely to make or break your overall financial plan.

But there can be tremendous power in learning by doing.

People often say that placing trades helps them understand investing more deeply.

And perhaps most importantly, it empowers them to ask incisive questions during those annual meetings with their advisor—rather than glazing over, tuning out, or struggling to feign interest. (We’ve all been there.)

I update my fractal model every trading day, so I generally think of investment alerts as same-day information.

That said, missing an alert is not a crisis.

If you see a buy alert a day or two after it’s published, it’s generally ok to buy the stock or fund except on the very rare occasion that I’ve already sold the stock or fund. An easy way to check is simply to go to the Trade Alerts section of the Member Library and look for a recent sell alert.

Sell alerts are a little more time-sensitive. I would say, get to a sell alert as soon as you can, even if you’re a day or two late.

Finally, the Friday Recap provides a weekly reset. It shows what I bought, what I sold, what remains in the account, and where the process stands at the end of the week. It can help you get reoriented and caught up if you’ve had a busy week.

Trading is supposed to create more space—not turn your phone into an emergency siren.

People often imagine that active investing requires sitting in front of six computer screens all day long. That is not what we’re doing here.

Your first trade usually takes the longest because everything is unfamiliar. After you have placed a few, the basic process tends to become much more routine.

The process requires a bit of attention, but it certainly should not require constant attention.

You are allowed to take a break.

Before stepping away, I’d say take a look at the investments you currently own. Before you leave or go offline, it could make sense to sell anything that has gone up since you first purchased it.

Then, when you get back, you can pick up again with your trading.

At the most practical level, you know it’s working if your account is generating investment income and growing over time.

That does not mean that every trade or every day will be profitable. Markets go up and down. Some trades will work, and others will not.

But the goal is for the account to grow over time, so I remind myself to zoom out periodically. It’s usually more helpful to evaluate the process over several months than to judge it based on one trade, one day, or even one week.

If you’ve ever gotten the sense that Wall Street is shady, just read Michael Lewis’ 2014 book Flash Boys: A Wall Street Revolt.

It tells the story of Brad Katsuyama, a trader at the Royal Bank of Canada, whose job it was to buy and sell stock for his clients—usually big pension funds and investment funds.

One day in 2009, Brad went to buy a big bunch of stock for one of his clients, and it was as though the stock market had “stopped working.” Usually, if Brad’s screen said that he could buy, say, Exxon stock for $83.25 per share, he could, in fact, buy Exxon stock for that price. But all of sudden, the price started jumping higher as soon as Brad hit “buy.” It was as though someone knew what he was doing before he did it.

From there, Lewis’ book details the rise of high-frequency trading, fragmented exchanges, dark pools, preferential order routing, and broker kickbacks to detect investors’ orders and trade ahead of them by fractions of a second. And it wasn’t just big investors like Brad and his institutional clients who were getting hosed. It was small, every-day investors like you and me trading through places like Schwab and Fidelity.

I have no way to know whether Lewis’ account is fully accurate, or the degree to which these market shenanigans are still going on today. But I don’t like the thought that a high-frequency trading firm could be taking advantage of me—even if it’s just by a few pennies per share.

So, I do two things to try to protect myself.

Bottom line: there’s no shame in just placing a basic market order and allowing your brokerage firm to route that order wherever it wants. But if you want to get fancy, you can manually send your orders to IEX and/or place a limit order.

I think it’s good to have a healthy fear of the stock market. As anyone who has lived through a market crash knows, investments can grow steadily for years—and then lose a significant amount of value in a matter of months.

A large part of what we are learning here is risk management: diversifying across different types of assets, limiting the amount placed in any single investment, monitoring the economic environment, and estimating a probable price range for each ticker symbol.

Even with those safeguards, investing is risky. I cannot guarantee that you will not lose money.

But inaction carries risks, too. Investing has the potential to create more space in your life—more flexibility, more choice, and more latitude to spend your time and energy on what matters most.

At the risk of sounding like a broken record, I would say, start small.

You are learning a skill, and you deserve credit for being willing to try.

You do not need to become a total finance junkie. Just take one step at a time.