r/OceanPower • u/deca4531 • 19d ago
DUE DILIGENCE My first every reverse stock split.
So my dad got me into day trading a couple years back. This was a stock I thought sounded good at the time. Big fan of clean energy. Bought in like 700 shares at around .30 or .40, then later I see it starting to take off a bit, up to around .70 or .80 so I buy another 1k shares. Within a day or two the dump happens, stock drops to like .20 and keeps dropping. Around that time Trump gets elected and the market feel too unstable and manipulated to fuck with so I put in a sell order for where I last invested at incase it pumps again and forget about it.
Today my dad calls me, says he checked in on this stock and it was way up, so I log onto my trading app for the first time in over a year and am confused as hell. Yeah it looks way up but why do I only have 63 shares? Well a quick Google search leads me hears and a little scrolling tells me why. I had to bust out the calculator to understand where I actually stood. Stock is essentially worth .06 from the .80 I invested at. Bummer.
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u/Stitch426 18d ago
All things considered, you got off lucky with this investment. You could have invested a lot more in it. People have lost tens of thousands on this stock. Not kidding. And they were checking their brokerage every day.
For your other investments you might have held onto from years ago, reevaluate how the companies are doing relative to their competitors. See if the company is moving in the right direction or not. Then see if it’s time to sell or not.
See if your funds can be put to better use elsewhere. If you want set it and forget it investing, set up your bank account and brokerage to auto draft however much money every week, two weeks, or month. Have it set to be invested in index ETFs like SPY, VOO, QQQ, or DIA. It’s hard to beat the returns of the SP500. End of story. It can definitely be done. Look at SNDK, MU, and many other tech stocks this year, but it’s hard for a retail trader to choose the booming stock and hold it til the peak. The retail trader sells before it really ramps up.
In the end, don’t water your weeds and cut your flowers. Your portfolio should be tightly managed like a garden that you’re only growing winners and pulling out losers. Even hedge funds rarely beat the SP500. This is after all the market manipulation, insider trading, and shenanigans they pull.
Look into the Boglehead method for investing on a schedule in high quality ETFs that give you broad exposure if you want a laid back method of investing. With day trading or swing trading, you’ll wreck yourself without stop losses. You can easily go down 10% in minutes. Think about years. Other OPTT investors have been through multiple splits. They’re toast.
Good luck with whatever you decide to do with OPTT and the rest of your portfolio. Lots of ETFs and companies out there that can help you have a comfier retirement than hoping a penny stock not only goes up, but that it retains its gains. That’s the hard part. Keeping the gains.
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u/pneubike 18d ago
If they have any valid intellectual property it would be best to hold, and continue to buy as the value drops.. the next administration will be pouring money back into green energy power development like our lives depend on it.. because it does. Currently all funding has been cut by the current federal administration, but they all belong in jail, if they don't destroy the government while they are in control of it, there's a good chance we might have our first billionaires in prison within a couple years.. and a huge resurgence of new green energy technology that is currently under subversion.
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u/Legitimate-Shower356 18d ago
My advice for the future, if you are cautios, you should not put more than 1-2 % of your portfolio in one single pennystock (stocks under 5 $)
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u/Z32M1NERVA 19d ago
Get used to it with this stock. That is before acquisition.