I learned a hard lesson today, and fortunately it wasn't that bad.
I invested a few thousand dollars in a penny stock carelessly (via ETRADE, with the intention of doing a short term trade, or a day trade if it proved worth it), without doing my research, and within a few hours (after the market closed), was punching myself in the face for being so stupid.
The company is Quantum International Corp (QUAN), and after doing my research I realized they have no product, no employees besides the CEO, and seem to be nothing more than a website asking for investments and promising huge returns. The CEO has a history of founding companies that promised a global name brand and never delivered so much as a brochure. The "news report" that made me buy the stock, passed down along BusinessWire, was nothing more than a fake press release by said CEO.
I know. It was insanely stupid. It will never happen again.
I had heard there were scammers among the OTC stocks, but somehow I didn't believe it.
And now I have this (ridiculous?) paranoid fear that I somehow won't be able to sell my stocks tomorrow morning, that somehow it'll prove impossible and my money will "vanish."
Am I being absurd? Should I be worrying? If I sell in the morning, I've only lost a couple hundred dollars, and learned a valuable lesson. Is there any reason to believe it won't be that simple?