My first venture into stock was terrible but my latest purchases have been doing pretty well. Ford (F) has gone up 47% since I bought in, making me 95 dollars. Bank of America (BAC) has made me 40 bucks (up 21%) and IMAX (IMAX) has been up and down but I'm at an 11% profit, a robust 11 dollars.

The biggest change in my extremely modest portfolio, however, is that I've now started investing in stock options. Instead of buying the actual stock, you buy the option to buy 100 shares of a stock at a certain price. The option prices seem to be more volatile than stocks but they also get your bigger gains, faster. For example, I bought 200 dollars of Ford stock in May. As I noted before, I've watched my shares increase in value by 47%. On Friday, I paid 200 dollars for an option contract of 8 dollars on Ford that expires in December. It's already up 39% and I've made 85 bucks. The downside, of course, is that things drop in value just as quickly. I bought an option on CVS and it dropped 20% of its value in one day. I also bought Hasbro and Sprint options which have lost some money but altogether I'm up over 100 bucks in this past week.

Right now, I think I'm going to hold onto everything I have but the next stock option I might invest in is US Steel. I was scared off because they showed a loss and are expected to show another next quarter but before the crash, it was trading at 150 and now it's at 42 dollars. It's up over 2 bucks today so I'm going to wait to see if it dips down before buying it but it seems like a pretty good bet. I'm still not sure if I'm going to buy it but I'm keeping an eye on it.