Rookie IRA Investor

I worked for many years in management in the health care industry in the UK, in Bermuda, and for the last 20 years in Florida. The day I turned 59 1/2 I just got out of bed and decided I didn't want to work any more and that I would just take my various pensions from different countries, such as they were, roll them all into one big IRA, and just see if I could live by my wits. My investment objective is, therefore, to make enough so that I never have to work again, although it would be easy for me to do so if I wanted.

I could probably get by very well with a 10% annual yield on my capital, but of course more is more and much more is much more.

When I started out investing in stocks, I really didn't ...More know what I was doing, but I had the occasional bit of luck, like investing every penny I had in BP in the summer of 2010, just when it couldn't go any lower. And it didn't. Then again I staked every dime I had on out of the money options on a drug that had a PDUFA date in January 2011. It was approved. Phew! But I was a nervous wreck and figured there had to be a better way.

Then about a year ago I started to study the whole business of options strategies, got myself a few books, and found out that you could sell options as well as buy them. This was a bit of a revelation, to say the least, because I had noticed that whenever I thought a stock would go up, it went down,and when I thought it would go down, it usually went up, but by selling options you could let other people's optimism work for you.

Then I found out about volatility. I had always known that the whole game was rigged, but now I began to understand how and why

I'm hoping that with some blog posts or articles here I can inform others about some of the things that I have learned in my time as a full time investor and personal hedge fund manager (O.K., layabout) so that they can avoid some basic errors, and I hope to attract enough criticism to be able to learn from those who know much more than me.