We are still in a pandemic. We have a new president. Vaccines are slowly rolling out, VERY SLOWLY. We got some new music from Jazmine Sullivan, Ariana Grande, and others. I am learning some new things. I also started back reading books again.

Music

Jasmine Sullivan released her first project in over 5 years titled Heaux Tales. It is amazing. My favorites: girl like me, on it, and lost ones. Go give it a listen.

Ariana Grande released a remix to her song 34+35 from her most recent album Positions. The remix featured Megan thee Stallion and Doja Cat. It’s nice. 34+35 was not my favorite song on the album, but it’s listenable.

Demi Lovato teamed up with Sam Fischer for their collab, What Other People Say. I like it. I went and listened to more of Sam Fischer’s music and I highly recommend listening to his EP, Homework. It’s so good.

Books

Last year before the pandemic I went to Barnes and Nobles and bought 6 books. I only ended up reading 2 of them. So, when this year started I said I wanted to get back into reading. I’m currently reading There There by Tommy Orange. It’s fiction. It’s good so far. I’m about halfway through it.

Investing in Stocks

While researching ways to add another stream of income, I stumbled onto videos and articles about investing in the stock market. Now, I was never one to pay much attention to the stock market, but the articles I was reading peaked my interest. As someone who didn’t come from wealth, I had always thought of the stock market as something only rich people engage in. This thinking is by design of I’m being honest. The wealthy don’t want the working class or poor class to get ahead even by a nickel. Traditionally the stock market was for rich people and you needed large amounts of capital to get involved. Thanks to the advent of no-commission brokerages such as Robinhood and M1 Finance, regular people have been able to get into the market. Traditional brokerages such as Schwab and Fidelity even changed their strategies to offer commission free trading and investing services. The stock market is still mostly controlled by the wealthy, but us regular people finally have a foot in the door. I may be waxing poetic here, but when you consider that the wealth gap in this country is extremely large and has only gotten larger during this pandemic, getting into the market may be a way that the working class can attempt to narrow that gap. I’m no financial advisor and it’s important to do your own research when getting into the stock market.

The brokerages I use are M1 Finance and Public. When I was researching brokerages, I considered Fidelity and Schwab because they were the traditional brokerages, but I didn’t like their app interface. I tried Webull but their interface was too chaotic as well. After looking around I found videos about M1 Finance. I downloaded the app and was very impressed. I opened my account the third week of January. M1 Finance offers traditional taxable accounts as well as retirement accounts. They also do fractional shares. I opened a taxable account and a Roth IRA. The Roth IRA is tax efficient as all gains and dividends acquired can grow tax free. You can’t pull out of the Roth IRA until 59 1/2, but your money gets to grow tax free until then. With the taxable account you will have to report earnings on next year’s taxes so keep that in mind.

Right as I got into the market, the GameStop $GME fiasco kicked into high gear. What a wild week that was. One great thing though, more people were introduced into the stock market. During this time my M1 portfolios took a small hit, but recovered. The $GME fiasco made me get a bit of FOMO because I didn’t buy in, so I decided to open up an account that I would dedicate to speculative stocks. I opened an account with Public. Public is similar to Robinhood as it offers fractional shares and you get free stock for signing up and getting others to sign up. I’m building up this portfolio to be mostly speculative with a couple defensive stocks in there for good measure.

Once again, do your due diligence if you decide to get into the market and learn all you can.

Odds and Ends

Well that’s my post for today folks. I wanted to share what I’ve been doing lately. If you want to get signed up with M1 Finance click on my link below. If you want to get signed up with Public also click the link below.

M1 Finance: https://m1.finance/SojeEz-9XunZ

Public: share.public.com/cjb_2014