I believe that there is a big difference between “PLAYING” the STOCK MARKET; and “WORKING” the STOCK MARKET.  Over the last few months, I have switched from Playing to Working.  It has made a large difference in my returns.

The guy in the picture is “Playing” the market.  There is no real work involved, just hope.  Not a good way to invest.  For your information, one of the USA’s big newspapers used to throw darts at the financial pages at the beginning of the year, and beat the market over 55% of the time. So who knows??

Playing is when you just pick stocks because you like the name of the company, or what it does. (I’ve never picked based on the name, but have picked on what the company does.)

“Working” the Market actually involves time, and effort, in the form of research.  For me, this entails in depth analysis of each stock in my Scans, (I have 5 scans that are reasonably accurate, 60%+) I check the company’s chart for the past year, what the insiders are doing, their financials, and what AI has to say about them. Based on this, I either add them to my watch list, discard them, or buy them.  Then I review my watch list, and my holdings daily.  Again with an eye to either buy, sell, or hold them.  I start about 6:30 to 7:00 AM which gets me ready to Buy or Sell after the market opens at 9:30.

I started doing this about 3 months ago, and the results have been very good.  Before that my research and review was done once a week.  It wasn’t enough.

Just for reference,  I have tried over 60 different scans.  I take the results every day and put them into a spreadsheet,  Then after a week, I check if the stocks went UP or Down and record the outcome.  Then at the end of each month I take the number of those stocks that went UP or stayed Even, divided by the total number to give a % accuracy percentage.  I also total the profit or loss of each scan for that month.  I monitor a scan for at least 4 months to see how it works in different types of market conditions.  In my research I came up with the statement that if you are right 60% of the time you will make money. Here is an example from one of my scan monitoring spreadsheets.

This is what one of my scan results were for Sept 2025.

My dad, (a very successful Investor) once told me that “If I had of known how much money I could make in the Stock Market. IF I SPENT AS MANY HOURS ON THE MARKET AS I DID WORKING, I would have stopped working 10 years ago”.

So what are you doing? WORKING or PLAYING??