My name is Jim Gerry, and I am a software engineer.   I became interested in investing in 1996.   When I first started investing, I would visit the public library on the weekend, spending hours flipping through the Value Line publication.   What a nightmare!   After only a few weeks, I realized that there were too many stocks to review, and too much data to ingest.   I thought to myself, "if I only had my own database of stocks on my PC."   I spent the next year collecting data, and writing a program to maintain my own database.

A year?!?   What took me so long?   Well, I have a family, and I wanted to keep my family.   So, I only worked on my computer after the family went to bed.   Furthermore, I only spent one hour programming, and one hour selecting stocks.   Now days, I rarely spend more than an hour on my computer.

My next project was to collect real-time intra-day data.   Was it possible to apply the same inter-day analysis techniques to intra-day data?   No doubt.   Once I figured out how to get the real-time data, my analysis algorithms hooked right in.   The last step was to write the routines to execute the trades.   The road to creating a real-time streaming day trader was a rough one!   There was so much to learn.   Looking back, I had a lot of fun!   By the way, I wrote everything in Visual Basic.   Don't laugh.

You know, I don't claim to be a pro.   Nor do I have a crystal ball that helps me pick stocks.   I have read a number of books, and I have learned a fair amount of information.   I follow the "bullish" industries, and I have a few rules that I never break:

• Buy low, sell high -- Never purchase a stock at its 52-week high.
• Minimize your losses, and maximize your gains -- Always set a stop-loss order.
• Only trade active/interesting stocks -- Follow volume.