Biography

I've spent my life working with dollars, but my career has limited me to mutual funds and exchange-traded funds. I've since started playing with stocks online -- and done well enough to win the Strategy Lab Open.

I was born in Blue Island, Ill., on the Chicago area's South Side, and raised in Fort Lauderdale, Fla. I tried as best I could to work my way through college and, after attending colleges in South Carolina and Florida, got a degree in accounting and business administration from Berry College in Georgia.

I started as an accountant and internal auditor and a few years later received my acceptance to law school in Atlanta (on the same day I got married). I graduated from the Woodrow Wilson School of Law and then passed the Georgia bar and CPA exams.

I continued my education with some post-baccalaureate and graduate work in accounting, quantitative math, science and education. I guess you could say I have a well-rounded education.

Being born in the North and spending most of my life in Florida, South Carolina, Georgia and North Carolina (including basic training in Louisiana), I'm a Northerner by birth and a Southerner by the grace of God.

I've had careers in accounting, internal auditing, law and financial services, and even taught graduate and undergraduate accounting and law (as well as a year spent as a middle school science teacher).

Just playing with stocks

Because my wife and I have always been in accounting and finance, we have been restricted in our investing due to our firms' conflict-of-interest and insider-trading rules. That made investing in individual securities impossibility.

But I bought a mutual fund with my first paycheck after college and have invested in mutual funds and ETFs within my employers' guidelines ever since. I'm a boomer and plan to invest my own money when I finally retire, but I don't want to jump right in cold turkey.

A few years ago, while browsing through Forbes magazine's "Best of the Web" supplement, I ran across some stock-market simulation games and thought I'd try one of their recommendations, Marketocracy.com. I wanted to see whether anything I had learned in selecting mutual funds could be transferred to individual stocks.

I started to get pretty good, and many of my funds earned green stars and ended up in the 90th to 99th percentiles. I've even gotten three blue stars for being in the top 100 out of 81,000 portfolios. (Marketocracy's coveted m100 classification, with all the gold stars, has eluded me.)

One day in one of Marketocracy's discussion forums, some of those gold-star guys were talking about this other contest they were in called the Strategy Lab Open, so I asked them a few questions about it. I've always found those guys to be very open and honest, sharing all their knowledge freely. It sounded like fun, so I thought I'd give it a try.

I started out really bad. But all of a sudden some of my stocks really kicked in for a wild ride. When I got to the head of the pack, a former Strategy Lab winner named Jamie Dlugosch, now editor-in-chief of InvestorPlaceBlogs.com, asked me why I wasn't blogging and encouraged me to do so. (It was required to win this coveted spot in Strategy Lab.)

Wow! Pretty soon people we asking me for my opinion, and my portfolio was up more than 60%!

I was into energy stocks, not on purpose but because that was what was coming up on my stock screeners. Then the banking bubble burst, the spot price of coal took a dive, and my portfolio was in a free fall.

When to sell?

I should have bailed, but all of the blogs and everything I read in the popular business news (even from Jim Cramer) said that you should be properly positioned in alternative fuels, so I delayed my exit strategy.

That was a big mistake in a short-term contest. The biggest lesson of my life is now to go with your own instincts and ignore others' opinions. I normally bail on any stock that loses 10%, and if I'd done that my Open return would have been 50% instead of the 33% I ended up with.

I've learned that to excel you can't hang with the pack. I'll pick stocks that the pack isn't in, and I'll buy and sell based on my own methodologies.

That being said: The moon is in the seventh house, and Jupiter is aligned with Mars. It's this old boomer's time to take on all these young Strategy Lab pros, and I'm ready for them.

Let's get ready to RUUUUUMMMBBBLLE!