Episode #1 - Real losses, real pain

Week 15 - 2025

Welcome to my newsletter SwingSpotTrader.com. My name is Hans Vogelsang. I’m from the Netherlands. I live in a small picturesque place about 50 kilometres above Amsterdam. I will keep you informed of my swing trading activities. In the coming year, I will try to take a position on the European or American stock exchange every trading day and I will describe all my considerations, the course of events and of course the results in this newsletter. And I guarantee that I will actually take the positions, so no demo accounts or other nonsense. Real losses will mean real pain.

I will briefly tell you something about myself. I was fascinated by the stock market from a young age. I would sometimes look in the newspaper to see what the share prices had done and calculate the profit I could have made. When the stock market crashed in 1987, I fictitiously bought 30,000 guilders worth of Dutch shares and wrote the list of shares in my school diary.

I can hear you thinking: ‘If only you had done that.’ Indeed, but if there is one rule in investing, it is that ‘if’ does not count. After this stock market crash, I bought a book by stock market guru André Kostolany: ‘Kostolany's Stock Market Chronicle for Investors and Speculators’. He wrote about soft- and hard-boiled eggs, referring to fearful and stoic investors. And that you should buy when all the soft eggs have sold their shares. A good lesson for the long-term investor.

I bought my first securities in 1995. First, very safely, a stock and bond fund from ING (then still called De Postbank). In the second half of the 90s, shares rose spectacularly and if you started investing at that time, like I did, you quickly got the idea that your investor IQ was disproportionately high. After 2000, this self-confidence disappeared again at lightning speed when many shares shrank.

I continued to invest during the first decade of this century and switched to individual shares. Since then I have focussed on swing trading and value trading. Sometimes successful and sometimes less successful. Unfortunately, the less successful decisions are also part of the investment party. Investing is a long-term game. If you have been at it a little longer and, like me, still make errors in judgement, then you know what I mean.