What are the best strategies for growing my very small port?

Playing with a small portfolio, you should be investing in the securities that are going to have the greatest change in value over the short term - that is, the next 24 hours or so.  Do not diversify your portfolio, but specialise by investing on just a few moviestocks.  And become familiar with the concept of droi, so you can identify which investments will be most profitable for you.

During the week, the biggest daily changes are usually related to news.  Keep an eye on the Movies board for news that traders are likely to react to, and invest accordingly.  If it is good news, buy, and if it is bad news, short.  Liquidate the investment at the end of the day, and re-invest the proceeds.  Don't be sentimental about keeping your investments, or hold onto one that has been losing you money in the hope that it will turn around.  Sell out and move on.  Also, if you are in a favourable time zone or have insomnia you can also take up reset trading.

On Mondays, you should check to see if there are any starbonds scheduled to adjust that are worth putting money into, keeping in mind that you will have to wait a day to see any gains.  kaigee.com is the best site currently available with this information.  Make sure to place your investments before they are halted after 3 pm PST.  Then on Tuesday after 1 pm PST, cash out and re-invest.

On Friday evenings and Saturday mornings, you should compare the prices of the moviestocks opening over the weekend against their predicted opening weekends.  HSX traders frequently call the weekend wrong, and there are plenty of opportunities to make substantial gains when openers are under-priced or over-priced.  Don't be afraid to go all in, provided if it is worth it on a droi basis.  Invest your entire portfolio, take the weekend off, and then come back on Sunday afternoon to liquidate and re-invest.

On Fridays, you should also look at investing in calls and puts, which only require a nominal investment but can pay out at several times that.

Every day, you should take five minutes to play the Earn H$ games.  It may not seem like much, but Learn & Earn and Movie Mogul together will earn you at least $300K per month, even if you guess half the questions wrong.

Keep track of your portfolio.  Seriously, create a spreadsheet in Excel and then every day copy and paste your net worth from the LTD leaderboard. Use your Net Worth History to cover the past 90 days.  Actually tracking my port size and calculating how much H$ I made each day is easily the single most useful thing I ever did.

Set a daily target for how much you want to grow your port, and keep track of whether you meet that target.   What target you set depends entirely on how seriously you want to play, but for a new, casual player I would suggest aiming to grow your port by an average of $100K or 1 per cent a day, whichever is greater.  More serious traders should be aiming for at least double that.

You can also set a target based on how other traders are performing.  This is done by tracking similar sized ports through your Trader Watchlist, and comparing your performance against theirs.  Are you doing better than them? Or worse?  If you're doing worse, figure out what are they doing that you are not.

One way to find out what other traders are doing is to join a league.  There are several leagues where new traders swap tips and compete, like the Port Value leagues which make it easy for similar-sized ports to compete against each other, and Razorhawk's HSX School and the Trading House of Ill Repute, which are both aimed at helping newer players learn about HSX and sharing hints and tips among members.  Also, leagues have discussion boards that are only viewable to members, which is good if you're more comfortable seeking advice from a smaller group.