Good time to sell funds?

IronWolf

If it is so easy to predict market moves then forget buying indexs, get yourself a highly leveraged spreadbetting account and you'll make a fortune.

EdGasket

IronWolf wrote: »

If it is so easy to predict market moves then forget buying indexs, get yourself a highly leveraged spreadbetting account and you'll make a fortune.

Not so because spread-betting is all short term gambling and rolling over bets costs. My timeframe is more in years than days but shares do drift up and then back again and as I usually buy dividend paying shares, I get the income while I wait. Sometimes a share will oblige and move up quickly but at other times patience is required.

I do not recommend spread-betting or leveraging in any way. It is by no means easy to make a profit in the stockmarket but a long timeframe helps. I was just asking if people thought active buying and selling shares was better than buy and hold for some shares?

bowlhead99

If you can / generally / profit out of timing your purchases of individual stocks then presumably you could _generally_ profit from spreadbetting. Both presume that you can benefit from second guessing the market. If you didn't want high spreadbet leverage you could just bet smaller and take less leverage. If active purchasing and selling _is_ advantageous for a particular stock then no reason you could not trade it, if you thought you could predict where it was going.

I am not recommending spreadbets to newbies either but if you think you know where a stock is going next there is no need to avoid that technique. It would seem ideal.

Chickereeeee

EdGasket wrote: »

I agree that you can't time the market and hence buy/sell funds with any accuracy to take account of market swings. However I do find that some individual shares seem to form a trading range for a while and it is possible to buy low and sell high and repeat this several times. Other shares however just seem to trend on either up or down without enough fluctaution to trade in and out.

What do people think about timing share trades rather than funds?

Have you heard the expression "picking up nickels in front of a steamroller"?

i.e. you can think you are doing well, picking up gains as the market/share price fluctuates, only to lose big time when something unforseen happens.

C

EdGasket

Chickereeeee wrote: »

Have you heard the expression "picking up nickels in front of a steamroller"?

i.e. you can think you are doing well, picking up gains as the market/share price fluctuates, only to lose big time when something unforseen happens.

C

Well the same would be true if you had bought and held; maybe even more so.

Ref. "If you can / generally / profit out of timing your purchases of individual stocks then presumably you could _generally_ profit from spreadbetting."

No that is not what I am saying at all. If I buy a share it may go up or down. If it goes down I am happy to hold for the income but may sell it if/when it eventually rises if it gets around a previous trading high. I would not want to hold losing spread bets long term; in fact I don't want to get involved with spread-bet companies at all!

JohnRo

I thought long and hard about cashing in my biotech investment a year ago, on the false assumption that realising the gains would give me a good 7 years to wait for a better price at a net +10% a year, before buying back in on the inevitable crash... In the end I decided I wanted to be invested anyway and never did, in fact I've topped up recently as part of a reworked rebalance.

The sp has gone on to more than double since first thinking about cashing in substantial gains early last year.

Orwell

Everyone has their own comfort zone. Right now I am moving some of my US fund holdings to an absolute return fund. These aren't guarenteed of course but tend to smooth out some of the sharper market movements. I also think the dollar will weaken and the Euro strengthen (relatively speaking) so a shift to from US to European funds might be worthwhile.

That is also pretty much the view of Fidelity in their "strategic assets" fund as they are now under-weight US and over-weight Euro stocks.

EdGasket

How can the Euro strengthen when they are printing billions of the stuff out of thin air? I agree Europe funds might do well but more on the economies recovering due to QE than on a strong Euro.

Kendall80

EdGasket wrote: »

How can the Euro strengthen when they are printing billions of the stuff out of thin air? I agree Europe funds might do well but more on the economies recovering due to QE than on a strong Euro.

Agreed. QE tends to cause the devaluation of a currency.

bowlhead99

However, market movements including currency movements depend on market sentiment, reaction to previously unknown news etc.

At the moment the average view is that Europeans will keep printing money while Americans will raise interest rates. If both of those do not occur to the extent expected and timescale expected, then the rates can move in _either_ direction.

It's like buying index linked gilts. Inflation can move one way or another, but the value or yield may change opposite to what you expected, if it wasn't what the market was anticipating