Recommended Spread Betting Courses for shares ?

silver_4444_uk

Datostar,

Thanks for the warning.

The one thing I do know is that nobody can always beat the market. I think it was Peter Lynch who said that you are doing well if 6 out of 10 of your investments make money for you.

Rgds.

Silver

Sledgehead

silver, To be frank, in respect of people I don't know, I class myself as somewhat of a misanthrope, so consider yourself lucky I'm bothering. However, you might wanna listen cos I have traded over the whole gammut of timeframes from second-by-second to buy and hold, through the dotcom boom, 911, the rise of commodities and the credit crunch. wrt spread betting, fundamental analysis is not appropriate. If you've done any reading you'll know Graham says : "In the short run the market is a voting machine. In the long run it's a weighing machine." FA relies on the market being a weigh machine. However, holding spread bet positions for any length of time will crucify you with interest charges. Remember SBs are leveraged instruments: that means you impicitly borrowing large amounts of money to open the position. You pay interest on that if the position is held over night. It is costs like these that will destroy your profit (if you are able to make any) over time. The alternatives to FA are technical analysis and what I call sentiment analysis. The former relies on pattern matching. essentially you learn patterns and hope they will replicate. Because this is probabilistic and not causal, your convictions (which will be scant) will be constantly challenged. It becomes a massive mind game. Because you can't by definition be right, you will have to learn when to accept defeat and close positions that lose. All this means churning. For that reason, the best advice anyone can give you is : accept this as entertainment and choose a SB firm for its costs. That means minimal spread. Sentiment analysis is something you won't be taught, but relies on metrics that judge the mood of the market. These methods produce contrarian traders. That's all I will say. That and don't do it.

Loughton_Monkey

Put it this way. For $3,000 you can buy one hell of a lot of textbooks on the subject!

I have never been on such a course, but my understanding is that you will learn very little that you can't learn virtually free from elsewhere. I think they will spend the time drumming into you obvious things like:

Never bet more than about 2% of your total account on any one 'play'.
Plan your 'play' in advance and set your sights on a risk/reward ratio of about 3 to 1 (in other words if you think there are 30 points to be made from FTSE, set you stop loss at about 10 points below entry.
Always invest with the trend rather than against it.

You would also learn a lot of stuff about support levels, resistance, momentum and a whole host of complex indicators.

Stuff like that.

Rollinghome

Loughton_Monkey wrote: »

There are all sorts of so-called 'courses' out there. Typified by offers of "free" seminars, which are there merely to get you signed up to expensive courses.

If there was anything at all true in what they claim, then of course they would not be telling you the 'secrets', they would simply be creaming the market themselves.

As Loughton implies, the old addage of 'those who can, do, those who can't, teach' is still a true one. No one who really could earn serious money trading stocks would waste their time running a website or flogging courses.

I was recently given a 'training course' that someone else had paid hundreds for. It's on four DVDs with a 'manual' of sorts and came with the promise that if it didn't pay for itself then they'd refund your money. The ploy was to offer free 'seminars' at which they sold the courses.

Obviously no one got their refunds and the character selling the courses went bankrupt and has since set up a new website. I looked quickly through it and it's simplistic nonsense, and possibly costly simplistic nonsense. But I've no doubt he'll have no trouble exploiting the fantasies of others once again and the 'find the lady' boys will be making money at the Derby again next year.