About

PennyShack.com is an online journal of trades made by me, Gabe Harriman.  I trade out of a little run down shed in my back yard that I call “The Penny Shack”.  I focus on trading highly volatile stocks in the lower price range, under $20.  I’m not great at it, but I’m getting better.  If you happen upon this site, don’t take anything I say as investment advice. I am a novice at best.

UPDATE 4/26/2010: I am taking a hiatus from trading the highly volatile “penny stocks” for a few months and focusing on more fundamentally sound stocks nearing significant breakout points.  I’m using the CAN SLIM method and following the Investors Business Daily on a regular basis.  This will be my core strategy for managing my retirement accounts.  When I start trading the pennies again, I will figure out a way to differentiate the two – maybe even make a second blog for my longer term investing strategies.

A little background on Gabe:

I went to undergrad at the University of Texas in Austin between the years of 1996 and 1999.  I was put on scholastic probation for my lack of academic performance and decided to focus my efforts elsewhere, a career as a programmer in the booming internet industry.

My experience with programming was limited, but at this time anyone who knew how to turn on a computer was given a job as a programmer making $60,000 regardless of educational merits.  So, I took a full time job in Austin at Trilogy Software, a strong competitor to Microsoft in the enterprise software business and a big internet player at the time.  I learned a little perl and then took a job in Los Angeles as a web programmer, having never touched a line of production level raw HTML or Java (the language I was to be programming in).

The dot com bubble burst a few months later and I began my first stint freelance consulting.  My consulting led me to work with a group of young entrepreneurs in Santa Monica.  After working with them and becoming very successful at mass email marketing (spamming), we branched off and started a little website called Myspace.

Once Myspace was started getting some momentum, I took off and started freelance consulting again and went back to my entrepreneurial ways.  I assisted in helping many new internet businesses get up and running, one of which sold to AOL for an undisclosed amount of money (lots).

Now, 10 years after my move to Los Angeles and not much to show for my career other than a pretty impressive resume, I’m ready to try something new.

Day trading…  The ultimate definition of self employment.  No clients to report to, no deadlines to hit…  Just a computer, a handful of monitors and raw market price and volume data streaming into my head.

My goal is to eventually replace my income with trading.  I’ve somewhat reduced my expenses and am working to reduce them even further before I set off on this journey.

I typically trade in the morning hours, between market open at 6:30 AM to 8:30 or 9:00 AM. I’m beginning to experiment trading entire market days, then working a full 8 hour day in my current career.  It can be taxing.  I’ve found that I’m best in the morning hours.

If you made it this far, thank you for reading!