Trading the stockmarket (NO Referrals)

I think there's a few of us here holding TW. RBS and Lloy, the bulk of my investments are in these shares.
Has anyone thought about an exit price for them? It seems to have gone mad the last week or so and I'm expecting quite a large retrace at some point or are they now just realising there true value?
What worries me is the thought of people getting too excited, a bit like the dot com boom, and the shares getting way overvalued only for them to crash back down.
 
That's exactly what is happening.

I too would be interested to hear the exit strategies, I'll try and offer advise as best I can, remember it's not about capturing every last penny!
 
chipperhead said:
I.
Has anyone thought about an exit price for them? It seems to have gone mad the last week or so and I'm expecting quite a large retrace at some point or are they now just realising there true value?
What worries me is the thought of people getting too excited, a bit like the dot com boom, and the shares getting way overvalued only for them to crash back down.
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I'm in the same boat, Lloyds and RBS are doing very well for me, however a retrace always makes me think the same thought of 'I should have sold' :D Great fun this share lark.

Im thinking RBS are enar to a peak - no reason other than feeling really.
 
dowie said:
Sim might be fun to play around with but I wouldn't bother going live with it- looking at the website its just an FX bucket shop who'll take the other side of your order - that, in itself, throws up a whole host of conflicts of interest.
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You're confusing a broker with and a marketmaker.

A retail broker acts as your agent. It is his job to get you the best price in the market. He will find you the best bid (highest selling price), or best offer (lowest buying price).

He does not take ANY positions. He is simply a broker/agent/intermediary.

In return, he will charge you a commission for his services.

A marketmaker acts as principal. He takes the other side of the transaction. If you are a seller, he will buy from you. If you are a buyer, he will sell to you. He makes his money from the spread (the difference between the bid and offer price. He may chose to hedge his new position, or trade out of it.

Ordinarily, a retail investor wont deal directly with a marketmaker. A broker will.
 
Edleake said:
You're confusing a broker with and a marketmaker.

A retail broker acts as your agent. It is his job to get you the best price in the market. He will find you the best bid (highest selling price), or best offer (lowest buying price).

He does not take ANY positions. He is simply a broker/agent/intermediary.

In return, he will charge you a commission for his services.

A marketmaker acts as principal. He takes the other side of the transaction. If you are a seller, he will buy from you. If you are a buyer, he will sell to you. He makes his money from the spread (the difference between the bid and offer price. He may chose to hedge his new position, or trade out of it.

Ordinarily, a retail investor wont deal directly with a marketmaker. A broker will.
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I think you're a bit confused here in assuming that the FX 'broker' you linked to (or most other retail FX 'brokers') actually acts like a broker.
 
Many people at the time thought the late ninities boom was overvalued also but the prices carried on up anyway.
So long as theirs enough free cash around and the idea of a v shaped recovery being possible it'll carry on I guess. I dont expect a crash personally

AMD were recommended recently and rose but I'd rather be in intel personally, they have the cash and international business to do well regardless.
Im not sure about amd so much, I think they are fabless now and so have reduced debts I presume but perhaps that also means less upside and I think they are still worse placed then intel.
Intel has a good yield and cover and I cant see a reason to go elsewhere.
 
dangerstat said:
Well those three things can be *very* useful.


Asymmetry essentially means the market reacts differently to positive vs negative movements. (If people hear some bad news about RBS they move quickly, if it's positive they alter there position slightly, very much a sign of risk averse trading).

Cluster volatility is pretty straight forward too, there are periods when deviation from the mean is consistently high (usually when the markets are a bit spooked).

If this is LLOY or RBS forecast with a asymmetric GARCH model, there's little else better - free software will do this for you. If you'all is interested I can show you how.

Excess Kurtosis is a nightmare, some of it is an artefact of cluster volatility but most of it is extreme values (strange large trades / movements). They can be really useful to make quick gains. Detecting them and exploiting them is trickier than it sounds. Again if there is enough interest could walk through effective techniques to do this.

Most of the time you invest based on what you think will happen in the short term, that's forecasting. These three little things can significantly influence how accurate (or not) your forecast is. All the models and software is free - so I advise you all to get to grips with how to go about it :)
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Any resources you can recommend so I can get to grips with them please? :)

I won't be using real money, just have a little play on bullbearings.co.uk to get a "feel" for it all.
 
All stats are derived from just price and volume. Watch the stock, the sector, the market and the currency and you should be able to get a feeling that way.
Stats beyond the basics are like a speedo on the dashboard, they confirm what you know

Post up here for a confirmation maybe. Try bigcharts.com and use the price by volume indicator


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join both?
 
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morguk said:
Can someone comment and give advice on my post about AMD please. It's about 8 posts up. Thanks :)
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Well firstly, just because they were higher in the past does not mean they are a bargain now. Shares mostly go down for a reason. With the way markets work if they were certain to go higher then they would be! Hope that makes sense, hard for me to put into works as I'm knackered.

And secondly you say Intel have done well with the new product releases etc, well that's AMDs competition right there who are releasing good products that are being received well. What are AMD doing? Is there a reason why they might suddenly 'get better'? Why not invest in Intel instead if they are doing better :)

It's all about the research.
 
But surely AMD will come back with a good product, they always do. AMD used to smoke Intel. Now Intel has won with the C2D but surely AMD will go all out to get a higher market share?
Thanks for the replys :)

By the way I'm also interested in putting money into Lloyds while they are still low, and maybe RedRow or another housing company. What do you guys think?
 
sniffy said:
Any resources you can recommend so I can get to grips with them please? :)

I won't be using real money, just have a little play on bullbearings.co.uk to get a "feel" for it all.
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Well the only recommendations I'd make are to get to grips with modeling the data yourself. If you only playing then you can grab minute by minute updates from many online service (I think I was streaming Yahoo at one point). Once you have the data, you can analyze it in R (http://www.r-project.org/) the main libraries (addons) are tseries and fSeries. Kevin Sheppard's pages (Oxford academic) here http://www.kevinsheppard.com/ (look at the MFE lectures) will introduce some basics, but more with MATLAB, but you can do the same stuff with R.

For the ideas I mentioned, most will return wiki pages (which aren't half bad to be honest).

To be honest some of the concepts are pretty hard if you've not done any statistics, but with a good couple of weeks, you should be able to master them from the applied side.

if you decide to have a go, feel free to post here and I'll try and comment / advise on how you get on.


To get you started with R, download it and try:
data(EuStockMarkets)
x = diff(log(EuStockMarkets[,3]))
hist(x, br="FD")

This is the distribution of logged returns for (IIRC) the FTSE, you should see the heavy tails, and perhaps leverage. To plot this series over time just use

plot(x, ty="l") - this will probably demonstrate clustered volatility

Like I say any questions post here.
 
Meh, I know this is smallfry but I've been given 2.35 shares in Walmart for free. Worth about $125 or so.

Do I wait for them to increase or just sell em for £75 now? :p Hmmm
 
dangerstat said:
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Great reply, thanks a lot.

It does all seem a little overwhelming but I'll certainly give it a go. I'm not expecting to get a real feel for it all for quite a few years. Not a problem though as I don't have the money :D Hopefully in tens years or so when I have reasonably well paid job and few commitments I can make an informed choice about how to invest my money. I actually find it all quite interesting so if I can find some good learning resources I'll definitely stick to it.

I'll start checking out the stuff you mentioned now. I've done a bit of statistics in my Maths modules at uni. Dunno how relevant it will be but hopefully can get my head round it.

Thanks for your offer to answer questions too. Unfortunately for you, I'll probably take you up on that :D

Edit

Just read through the cross-sectional data lecture slide. Fair to say absolutely nothing is relevant lol, this stuff is savage.
 
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