Stocks and Shares - the long game, newbie needs advice

DrSyn

(a) No one will care as much about your money as you will, so the saying goes. Read before you invest!

(b) I suggest you take a look at the following sites and learn from them.

http://monevator.com/highlights/

http://www.fool.co.uk/investing-basics/getting-started-in-investing/how-to-start-investing/

http://www.candidmoney.com/

(c) Always look to keep the charges & fees you pay as low as you can. Less in costs the more money you end up with. Especially important over the long term!

silver145

Zola. wrote: »

Would there be much benefit in putting in say £50 a month so to an Index type fund, would there be any point in this? Can you even do this? Is that too low?

I am thinking long term plan, like 20 years.

yes, people do it quite alot because of month cost averaging, sometimes the prices will go up, sometimes they will go down, but with investing monthly you will hit both so your average cost evens out. But personally i would go with more than 50

google monevator

jamesd

If you were experienced and playing a long game it's worth looking at the cyclically adjusted price-earnings ration and observing that now is not a particularly good time to be invested in a lot of the world's stock markets, so using something else for a while might be a good move.

But it seems that you are not yet experienced and in your situation the value of getting stuck in so you can learn and see what happens with real money at stake beats that argument: you need the experience more. So definitely get started and see how your stomach reacts during drops when actual money is on the line. Nothing beats that practical experience.

Apodemus

FrankToth wrote: »

I'd rather use demo account(s) first. During the first couple of months you can learn what type of investing is the best for you (FX, Index, CFDs etc, STocks etc...). Also, while you are trading with demo accounts you should check news on different sites such as bloomberg.com or cnbc.com, you can use investing.com for technical analysis and yieldog.com for automated emails for index trading.
Bests

I would disagree. A demo account is really only useful for someone who is thinking of doing lump-sum investment and/or frequent trading. Someone who is investing for the long-term on a monthly drip-feed basis will not learn from the short-term ups and downs of looking at a demo account for a couple months. There is a high chance that they get swayed by a big anomalous rise in one particular investment and conclude that this strategy will be best in the long term.

ColdIron

FrankToth wrote: »

I'd rather use demo account(s)

I'm going to call this spam, poster is pasting similar text into old threads

Apodemus

ColdIron wrote: »

I'm going to call this spam, poster is pasting similar text into old threads

Thanks, hadn't noticed the multiple newbie posts into old threads!

d712

Once you have selected your investments a common piece of advice is not to check them often, maybe only once a year.

Although that may work for some if not most people, my own preference is to check them regularly. I check them every day but maybe that's a little excessive!!

If I checked mine after quarterly, six month or yearly intervals I would have had the shock of my life and found they'd gone down by thousands of pounds and may have panicked, sold up and pulled out.

By checking them regularly I was at least able to see what direction they were heading in and not have any terrible shocks as a result.

I'm glad I did that as I never really considered selling at any point and am now doing much, much better. And if there are changes in the wrong direction in the future (as there inevitably will be) I'll be able to see where things are going without the sudden shocks.