The company I work at is mostly growth oriented. As I found out early own, stocks and mutual funds could be separated into three main categories: growth, value, and blend. Four of our publications focused on growth stocks, and one focused on value stocks. Not surprisingly, the growth stocks are what drew my attention. Some of the profit margins advertised by the value newsletter were very impressive, but I didn’t want to see what would happen if I invested in a stock and sold it two or three years later.

It was also at this time that I accidentally tuned into a show that I had once found incredibly annoying: Jim Cramer’s Mad Money. I had first seen this show a few months earlier, when channel surfing, and stopped momentarily just because I couldn’t figure out why they were doing a sound effect demonstration on CNBC. Once I realized what this show actually was, I couldn’t figure out how people watched it without getting a headache.

Of course, with my newfound interest in growth stocks, I began to turn on the show nearly every night. Hearing about various stocks (including a lot that we included in our company newsletters), and the reasons behind whether it was strong or not, was very interesting.

My savings was still recovering from the past few years of graduate school, but I was extremely anxious to start investing. At the various financial websites I visited, I was constantly barraged by ads for discount brokerages. I looked into these, and soon discovered that you really could trade stocks for only $5-$10 a trade.

The next day I signed up at Scottrade. The signup process was a tad intimidating, as they needed a lot of my personal information, and I had to click off a lot of checkboxes saying, among other things, that I wouldn’t do insider trading. Eventually, my account was setup and ready to go, just waiting my initial $500 deposit.

So I took a look at our company’s model portfolio … and saw that the portfolio consisted of 10-15 stocks spread over $100,000 dollars. Surely I could invest with less than that though, no? I looked up some of their favorite stocks and saw I could buy maybe 10 shares of a stock and use up the $500 I set aside.

But I soon realized that by paying $14 to buy, and eventually sell, $500 worth of stock, I would be paying 3% in transaction fees. My measly $500 didn’t look like it was going to cut it, and the frustration of opening my account and being a step away from trading stocks before realizing it wasn’t remotely realistic snubbed my interest in stocks. At least, for a week.