I placed my first trades with real money a couple of days ago! Both are bull put spreads, I opened one contract with TSLA and three with AAPL.
Why these companies? I'd done a bit of paper trading and both performed well with high return on risk. Tesla is generally volatile and therefore trades often close pretty quickly, so I get to recycle the money faster - but the volatility also increases risk, so I kept my position small.
Apple has also been moving enough to close out trades pretty quickly, and I feel overall it's less volatile than Tesla, so I like the slightly lower ROR while maintaining the churn with increased stability.
There's only a few thousand dollars at risk for potentially a few hundred dollars of gain, but projected ROI is about 9% if I'm closing at 50% so that's awesome. I plan to hone in on a few companies I like to trade spreads on and gradually increase my number of contracts (perhaps over a couple of different positions) to start generating some meaningful profits.
UPDATE 12/5: After 3 days in the trade, my Tesla position closed for a profit of $210 🎉