Things got weird enough for a while there that I went back to a chip and dip strategy...if I'm putting money into anything other than an index fund, it's a blue chip, on a dip.
When there was the chaos in the Rogers boardroom I figured it would rattle Shaw's price a bit and I have done really well on that - when the buyout was originally announced, I had something like $10,000 in Shaw stock and it jumped from $18 to $28 overnight; right now it's sitting around $29-29.5 most of the time. At current exchange rates, the buyout deal will hit at $31.65, assuming it all goes through.
So when it hit just over $28 a couple of weeks back I dumped in the remainder of my available cash reserves and now I have about 1000 SJR which, again assuming the deal goes through and if you factor in the dividends they pay, will have made me an average of about $15 CAD per, that's pretty good. I think that's been my largest single stock profit. I did pretty well grabbing AMZN during the first Covid meltdown at about $1800, and BA a couple of weeks later. But I think my take on them has been a little lower, actually, which is kind of funny, because to be honest I never took the Shaw stock that seriously, I just thought it was generally undervalued, was going to come up, and paid a good dividend, and I wanted to start looking at dividend stocks and thinking about them.
AMZN was a sledgehammer of a stock, but since I had already put the vast majority of my money into stuff like VOO, I just didn't have the kind of cash on hand to pour into my picks in March of 2020 when all the bargains were there for the taking.
Still, even factoring out the "o hey lets just print another trillion dollars lol" monetary policy, the whole market has been crazy hot and if you have money to put in it, you pretty much have no choice but to pour it in because the inflation has gotten out of control. I've been averaging something like 16% for five years now - obviously 2018 dragging the numbers down a bit there - and most of that is index funds, with just a few forays into stocks that scream at me to grab them because they look crazily undervalued at that moment. I doubt I'm much different than just being in straight index funds. Once you subtract the inflation, it's still big gains.
Sure gives you a sense of riding a tsunami, though...
Oh well, I don't think about monetary policy, and the US money printer go BRRRRR so it's ride the wave or drown underneath it, I guess.