re: How did you get into the stock market?

1991. I got a cold call from a broker at Raymond James about some company that had a patented process for some microbe that eats the creosote from utility poles so they could be recycled. The process was developed by LSU. I agreed to buy $100 to get the broker off the phone. She told me that the minimum investment was $1,000. I foolishly agreed and lost everything within a few years. I eventually opened brokerage accounts with Dean Witter and invested in nothing but mutual funds for 15 years. I’m sure losing my entire investment on one stock is the reason I did that. I worked at UPS from 1987 to 2003 and received stock as part of my compensation those last 5 years. I continued to reinvest UPS’s generous dividend into more shares. My Merrill Lynch broker put me into Apple and Google in 2010 but most of my investments were still in mutual funds. Took control of my accounts about 2-3 years ago and have been very successful trading mostly stocks on my own since. I also still hold all of the UPS stock I accumulated since 1998.