Your stick looks a lot shinier than mine. I'm jealous now.
Anyways, holding the stick like a winecup between your 3rd and 4th fingers is how I do it too.
Just in case you want some more advice, here are some pointers I learned:
1) The hardest part about stick is learning the difference between the 3, 6, and 9 directions. You'll get a lot of mileage if you just sit down and train your wrist to rotate in those directions. Wrist control, I learned, is much more important than finger control. When I started, i kept on screwing up 236 because I either rotated to high (in which case I jumped) or rotated too low (in which case i just kept crouching). Learning how to keep your wrist at the 6 position consistently will help you nail your throws a lot cleaner too.
2) The stick will jiggle. A lot. This was really annoying and still is pretty annoying. After doing, let's say a 214, when you reset to neutral position, the stick wiggles a bit and you might end up getting a 6 input or a 8 input. This does tend to screw up some of your more complicated motions so don't ever let go of the stick. I fucked up 623 motions so bad at first since I would let go of the stick after the 3 motion only to find out the stick would jump to 9 by itself. (momentum is a whore) Until you get solid wrist control, keep your hand on the stick at all times.
3) You will hate 623 motions with a passion at first. I guarantee you. As stated above, it all starts with beginning at 6. I fucked up DPS so many times because I had bad control and ended up doing 323 which does nothing btw. When you get that down, the next part which will give you trouble is just doing the motion consistently.
Initially, I just tried pulling the stick from 6 to 3. It worked better than trying to roll the stick from 6 to 2 to 3 but sometimes I would miss the 2 and do nothing. So here's what I learned to do: MBAC controls are generally pretty loose. So instead of a 623, try to do a 6123. From forward, pull the stick all the way to the bottom left and then pull forwards to bottom right. It doesn't work as well for Guilty Gear but for MBAC, it's golden.
4) IAD blows. I still can't do it subconsciously so a lot of times in matches, I'll jump forward for dumbass reasons and eat EX Katto. But the best way I figured out how to do it is to go 96. It's just like forward dashing but the first tap is in the up-forward direction instead of the forward direction.
5) TK was surprisingly easy to learn. What was weird though was that instead of 2369A, TK worked a lot better when I did 239C. When I try to do 2369 I end up super-jumping a lot more instead of TKing. I guess pulling the stick from 3 to 9 makes your clear 6 faster? I'm not too sure. I try to avoid characters that use TK anyways.
6) Akiha is a great choice to start learning stick. She doesn't have annoying 3b or 3c command inputs (which fuck up any 2ab chain you'll ever try to do -.-) but she does have 6c and 4c command inputs. So you can practice basic chains and still recognize when you're stick control is screwing up.
Good luck on your stick! Once you go stick, you'll never use anything else.