Trading the stockmarket (NO Referrals)
- Thread starter mcast123
- Start date
As been said on here before, with any trading be it stocks or forex you should only use money you are prepared to lose, if you are not then dont trade with it and look for another low risk investment, obviously low risk does normally mean low return but at least your money is safe.
Just thought i'd post an update as someone quoted me above.
Daytrading. I have now been doing it over a month and am still in profit! Not a lot but I learned quickly in the first week how much emotion can affect your trades. It is said everywhere but whilst paper trading you simply do not get the emotional instability. Despite paper trading for about 2-3 months, and by the last month earning average about $300 per day I decided to jump in to live trading.
First day, was -$1000 and then exactly a week later I was up $1100, so had made back $1000 plus an additional $1100. Then I lost over $900 the next 2 days as the market changed, I was too emotional with the trading and was basing the amount of shares I bought on paper trading where it didn't really matter if it was swinging to -$1000 as it wasn't real or you could just buy more shares at the lower price in the hopes you break even. In real trading that is the killer, which is how I lost the $900 over 2 days.
So I went back to the basics of reading the charts and decided if I was going to do it properly, I needed to be smart and realise that emotion is the absolute biggest factor. Due to this I decided to limit my share size to max 100 until I was consistently profitable with a daily goal of $50 - not a lot but most day traders tend to trade 5000-10000 shares but if you are right the share size shouldn't matter. Anyway, 2 weeks of the max 100 shares and I made $300 so 6 days out of 10 I was profitable (and stopped when I hit my $50 mark as the more trades you make the more likely you are to enter a truly bad one) and the others was +/- $10-20. As I am not depending on it as a source of income at the moment I am quite happy to trade small and perfect my strategy whilst getting my emotions under control - you are far more likely to sell when your -$100 even if the chart hasn't broken the pattern you bought into - but as its real money you think you're wrong and try to minimise losses, which isn't a bad thing but you need to judge your 'stop' correctly you struggle to let your 'strategy' play out as you don't want to risk the amount of 'real' money that you would in paper trading.
I think I will always be learning but am constantly going over YouTube videos, trading DVD's and all sorts. As if you get the basic's right as in risk/reward even if you trade poorly at the beginning you will know when your strategy is 'wrong' and you will get out of the trade quickly.
I am going to look into Swing Trading as several of my numerous losses would have equalled $1000's if I had ignored the swings in price and held for simply a day.
Not sure exactly what my post is trying to advise except that Day Trading is very possible but it requires much more commitment and emotional pressure than probably most jobs in existence, sometimes you have about 5 seconds to judge as to whether to 'get out or stay in' which most people can't handle and i've certainly struggled with but practice makes perfect and I am still very far from being a successful 'daytrader; but as I worked in goverment administration for 10 years I don't need to earn a lot to beat that wage
I ended up using Interactive Brokers as they have very low commissions and exchange rates - not the best customer service but for a UK customer who wants to trade US stocks value wise its hard to get better, just hope you don't have to phone them (1 very helpful, 2 terrible and 1 was ok).
I think I just posted this because I have seen so many people say its not possible and burn your money instead etc etc which isn't entirely accurate. It just requires an extraordinarily high amount of discipline and research. More than any job i've had previously but if you dedicate the time, trade small for a long time (of course get started in a paper account but don't think for a second it is the same as real trading, once real money is on the line your emotions will own you!) Yes you can perfect your strategy but you would be surprised how much less confident you are in it even if you were right 90% of the time when trading paper money then it is a viable choice, just don't think you can jump straight in - you can be +$500 on a trade and then -$1500 within the space of 10 seconds..
Daytrading. I have now been doing it over a month and am still in profit! Not a lot but I learned quickly in the first week how much emotion can affect your trades. It is said everywhere but whilst paper trading you simply do not get the emotional instability. Despite paper trading for about 2-3 months, and by the last month earning average about $300 per day I decided to jump in to live trading.
First day, was -$1000 and then exactly a week later I was up $1100, so had made back $1000 plus an additional $1100. Then I lost over $900 the next 2 days as the market changed, I was too emotional with the trading and was basing the amount of shares I bought on paper trading where it didn't really matter if it was swinging to -$1000 as it wasn't real or you could just buy more shares at the lower price in the hopes you break even. In real trading that is the killer, which is how I lost the $900 over 2 days.
So I went back to the basics of reading the charts and decided if I was going to do it properly, I needed to be smart and realise that emotion is the absolute biggest factor. Due to this I decided to limit my share size to max 100 until I was consistently profitable with a daily goal of $50 - not a lot but most day traders tend to trade 5000-10000 shares but if you are right the share size shouldn't matter. Anyway, 2 weeks of the max 100 shares and I made $300 so 6 days out of 10 I was profitable (and stopped when I hit my $50 mark as the more trades you make the more likely you are to enter a truly bad one) and the others was +/- $10-20. As I am not depending on it as a source of income at the moment I am quite happy to trade small and perfect my strategy whilst getting my emotions under control - you are far more likely to sell when your -$100 even if the chart hasn't broken the pattern you bought into - but as its real money you think you're wrong and try to minimise losses, which isn't a bad thing but you need to judge your 'stop' correctly you struggle to let your 'strategy' play out as you don't want to risk the amount of 'real' money that you would in paper trading.
I think I will always be learning but am constantly going over YouTube videos, trading DVD's and all sorts. As if you get the basic's right as in risk/reward even if you trade poorly at the beginning you will know when your strategy is 'wrong' and you will get out of the trade quickly.
I am going to look into Swing Trading as several of my numerous losses would have equalled $1000's if I had ignored the swings in price and held for simply a day.
Not sure exactly what my post is trying to advise except that Day Trading is very possible but it requires much more commitment and emotional pressure than probably most jobs in existence, sometimes you have about 5 seconds to judge as to whether to 'get out or stay in' which most people can't handle and i've certainly struggled with but practice makes perfect and I am still very far from being a successful 'daytrader; but as I worked in goverment administration for 10 years I don't need to earn a lot to beat that wage
I ended up using Interactive Brokers as they have very low commissions and exchange rates - not the best customer service but for a UK customer who wants to trade US stocks value wise its hard to get better, just hope you don't have to phone them (1 very helpful, 2 terrible and 1 was ok
).I think I just posted this because I have seen so many people say its not possible and burn your money instead etc etc which isn't entirely accurate. It just requires an extraordinarily high amount of discipline and research. More than any job i've had previously but if you dedicate the time, trade small for a long time (of course get started in a paper account but don't think for a second it is the same as real trading, once real money is on the line your emotions will own you!) Yes you can perfect your strategy but you would be surprised how much less confident you are in it even if you were right 90% of the time when trading paper money then it is a viable choice, just don't think you can jump straight in - you can be +$500 on a trade and then -$1500 within the space of 10 seconds..
Soldato
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Its not a perfect hedge against anything but staying all in cash seems an unnecessary treadmill in terms of saving, saving outside cash only adds risk in some peoples view. I guess my point is that cash itself is risky, people will disagree but Iam saying it anyway as Im certain its a phenomena which will accelerate.
I know conventional advice is of course stay safe but its fairly certain rates of return are below inflation sadly. Bit of a leaky bucket situation and hope it dont leak too much value by the time you can use it.
Endowment mortgages have been done before, but dont think I'm going to win this argument am I
7 hours of Buffet's annual shareholder conference, probably good advice in there somewhere for any investor
https://finance.yahoo.com/brklivestream
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Soldato
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Always stay liquid yep, I know people who potentially were talking about their house deposit for like a decade and they never really saved up anything much and it was a massive drama to get any deal done with little to put down. Partly because they are awful at not spending but also this effect of poor cash returns imo.
I got much sympathy for anyone saving for a house right now, Im not a fan of renting also most rents are not low. Its all slanted to those who already have it sorted
I love cash savings sometimes, I think it was 1995? I could have got 10% fixed PA for five years guaranteed. I thought that was excellent as gov was allegedly 'tightening' at that time and in addition the Building society converted and I got £250 of shares free, awesome stuff
(they even rose a bit before I sold I think, Bristol and West?)
Short term sure, tough luck really. Again I used to get 10% with a 1 month notice account when I was saving for a PC years ago, these things dont exist now for political reasons. Premium bonds maybe, try this forum: http://forums.moneysavingexpert.com/
Right now the context is governments have run giant amounts of QE. They have not and will not be able to reverse that QE afaik because doing so would require a government surplus. Most governments are still running a deficit in spending which means larger debt, conflicting with ending QE and/or raising rates in any substantial way.
The current USA policy seems to be towards even more extreme spending. Its all loose money, its an awful time to be stuck in cash.
I got much sympathy for anyone saving for a house right now, Im not a fan of renting also most rents are not low. Its all slanted to those who already have it sorted
I love cash savings sometimes, I think it was 1995? I could have got 10% fixed PA for five years guaranteed. I thought that was excellent as gov was allegedly 'tightening' at that time and in addition the Building society converted and I got £250 of shares free, awesome stuff
(they even rose a bit before I sold I think, Bristol and West?)Short term sure, tough luck really. Again I used to get 10% with a 1 month notice account when I was saving for a PC years ago, these things dont exist now for political reasons. Premium bonds maybe, try this forum: http://forums.moneysavingexpert.com/
Right now the context is governments have run giant amounts of QE. They have not and will not be able to reverse that QE afaik because doing so would require a government surplus. Most governments are still running a deficit in spending which means larger debt, conflicting with ending QE and/or raising rates in any substantial way.
The current USA policy seems to be towards even more extreme spending. Its all loose money, its an awful time to be stuck in cash.
These charts dont really give perfect clarity, in order show just how poor cash is I'd probably have to do my own data series and chart in excel and cba right now.
So its not clear enough possibly, I'll leave it up to people to interpret it themselves but to ever get ahead of the curve is not going to be done with cash imo
http://stockcharts.com/freecharts/historical/marketindexes.html
So its not clear enough possibly, I'll leave it up to people to interpret it themselves but to ever get ahead of the curve is not going to be done with cash imo
http://stockcharts.com/freecharts/historical/marketindexes.html
Talking about debt, here's an interesting commentary http://www.reuters.com/article/us-review-crisis-breakingviews-idUSKBN1811XP?platform=hootsuite
Soldato
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Isnt Xtract the one with really expensive oil and then financing problems I thought wiped shares out. Bonds > shares
Look at HUR also
Acacia is less then half their peak after some possible corruption in 1 country. I've followed them a while, they were ABG or African Barrick gold, part of the worlds largest gold mine company I think who wanted to sell them. Seems a reasonable prospect, overall gold is not popular now and this company is spread in risk not just one mine or one country. Since CEY is my largest hold and it is just 1 mine this seems relatively low risk to me, also I could transfer some BTC to ACA
Look at HUR also
Acacia is less then half their peak after some possible corruption in 1 country. I've followed them a while, they were ABG or African Barrick gold, part of the worlds largest gold mine company I think who wanted to sell them. Seems a reasonable prospect, overall gold is not popular now and this company is spread in risk not just one mine or one country. Since CEY is my largest hold and it is just 1 mine this seems relatively low risk to me, also I could transfer some BTC to ACA
yuk - I'm not sure these sorts of gurus are too helpful
this particular guru was previously producing 'research' for a company called blue index
doesn't exist now as the FSA (now FCA) shut the company down for insider trading which, if members of the company resorted to that, does make me wonder if his 'research' wasn't too useful to them but perhaps was more useful just for marketing etc.. at the time it operated there seemed to be a lot of people complaining about losing money with the firm.
Anyone seen the Good Energy bond? Link.
It seems to have a significantly better interest rate than any of the other four-year bonds on Money Supermaket (especially if you're already a Good Energy customer).
It's also a much better return than dividends if you were a Good Energy shareholder (although I appreciate the share price could increase).
Any obvious reason not to go for it?
It seems to have a significantly better interest rate than any of the other four-year bonds on Money Supermaket (especially if you're already a Good Energy customer).
It's also a much better return than dividends if you were a Good Energy shareholder (although I appreciate the share price could increase).
Any obvious reason not to go for it?
Deciding to potentially back out of share trading. I'm not far off flat in a good while. Biggest thing recently was finding out a few days before pfc was 800 and now 400.
It was one I thought was pretty safe.
Compared to Bitcoin is pittance. My Bitcoin investment is 10x now.
It was one I thought was pretty safe.
Compared to Bitcoin is pittance. My Bitcoin investment is 10x now.
I've just started LifeStrategy but it's early days so can't really judge it yet.
as in the Vanguard funds?
surely similar risks to any corporate bond - I don't know much about that company in particular though the skeptic in me would wonder if they're able to sell them at lower yield than they'd expect in the market by promoting them directly to the general public like that... ergo are you actually being compensated fairly for your risk
Yes and Blackroad consensus
The majority of my 'portfolio' is currently Vanguard lifestrategy 80, I was just wondering if anyone wiser would recommend it ?
I have read Tim Hale Smarter invested and 'Own the world' but I'm still very much a novice but I feel this is giving me good 'spread'.
Thanks Kevin
Yep my ISA is Vanguard LifeStrategy 80.
DIY Investor has had the 60 for 2 years - https://diyinvestoruk.blogspot.co.uk/2017/05/vanguard-lifestrategy-60-year-2-update.html
They're in a different stage of investment but you can't really go wrong with it.
If you just want somethig simple and not have to worry about it then it's perfect. You could go for one of their Target date funds as that will autoatmically change bond allocation as it gets nearer the target date (read as retirement), if that's what you're investing for.