My mistakes so far

Two quarters into the year I'm in the red... a lot. Well, unrealized looks worse than realized. I won't give an exact number because I don't care right now. I like my current picks and feel they will be up in the long term. I am all for value investing and if I make a quick buck while doing so, great. But value investing isn't synonmous with day trading; so many people seem to forget that. In fact, I stopped looking at my etrade portfolio tab. I'll follow my stocks via yahoo etc, but I don't want to know exactly how up or down they are. I am of the opinion that seeing a big red number will make me panic. I don't want to panic.

I'd like to take a look back at the picks I have made in which I realized losses and comment on them. I'm also going to comment on some picks I made that were stupid, but I realized gains on.

Lost
CPBY - First stock I bought. Did no real DD, didn't do my own share price estimate. Actually don't think it's a bad company. Just not as undervalued as others. In fact, didn't know what undervalued really meant. Price dropped, I had no estimate, didn't know what to expect. I panicked. I sold.
TRMD - BAH! Saw the dividend (when I bought). Great yield. Buy. Only problem, I knew nothing about the shipping industry...or the country they were based out of. I watched it trade flat while the shipping ETF went up. Then they cut the dividend...I sold at minimal loss. Could have been worse. Investing to learn, well I sure learned; seeing a dividend doesn't mean it will always be there.

Gain
SPKL - dumbest "investment" ever. Nothing pointed at a good company. I got lucky. Very lucky. In fact, I'm not even going to list everything that was wrong with it because I don't know what the max number of characters per post is. Let's just go with ridiculously high O/S, poorly run, brand that wasn't quite catching on. Oh yeah, and NO EARNINGS.

KERX- I'm going to analyze this just because I like this pick. I found it in the high twos before any news started coming out. Now it seems to be finding resistance in the high threes. I did much more research on this company. Slowly learned from the mistakes above. Lots of cash to fund trials, multiple drugs in the pipeline, and a potentially huge market across multiple forms of cancer with their drug perifosine. Am I a bit nervous due to the number of cancer drugs that fail in phase 3? Yes, but that's why I sold some of my shares in the 6's when the price jumped on some fast track news. Wasn't going to pass up an easy double. Holding the rest and hoping for some big gains.

I have a list of my mistakes on a piece of paper. When I buy stock in a new company, I make sure I don't repeat any of the mistakes above. I suggest you do the same. One thing I have realized in this short amount of time is, the more emotion you take out of it, the better you do. I think you'd be hard pressed to find someone that disagrees.