Twenty-one-year-old Kiersten Crum began investing in stocks in 2020 after the COVID pandemic shut down her school in Sunrise, Missouri. After starting off with $500, she has amassed a five-figure portfolio and has become a TikTok star among young investors, reports The New York Times:
Ms. Crum, who calls herself the Stonk Queen [on TikTok], using the deliberate misspelling of “stock” that’s popular among online traders, has used the year to learn how the market works. “Any terms I didn’t understand I wrote down on a list,” she said. “I treated it as school.”
…Every night, she meticulously compiles a list of the stocks she’s watching using different measures. One of them, an online tool called a volume scanner, filters out stocks that are being traded more or less than usual, which she believes can tip her off to a good bet. And she tries to mitigate her risk: Ms. Crum uses stop-loss orders, to sell a stock when it hits a certain price, and limit orders, which let investors set more specific instructions.
Like many other young traders, she’s big on sharing what she learns — usually in TikTok videos to her 163,000 followers. Ms. Crum posted one about candlestick charts, which illustrate the price range of a holding on a particular day. In another, she explained how to use relative strength index, or R.S.I., which measures price changes over time and can indicate when a stock might be oversold or overbought. “I started out doing swing trades, an old reliable way to go about trading,” Ms. Crum said, adding that she’ll day-trade if she spots something that appears to be “an obvious winner.”
Like other young investors, she is riding a wave that would not be possible without the widespread adoption of commission-free trading in late 2019, which threw open the doors to those without deep pockets.
(Source: The New York Times, Stonk Queen/TikTok)