Making big and quick money on stocks and shares.

Happychappy

Startup1985 wrote: »

Plan B is to hold them until they eventually do rise again (if they do). As said this is spare cash so I won't miss it too much but would love to grow the pot. I don't mind holding the shares longer term if there is a drop with the hope of thins turning around but if the future looks dire I will offload and retry with others, hopefully once I build a bit up even a loss on one particular share will not take me below my starting point.

Also with all the researching I'm hoping it to be less of a gamble and stab in the dark and more a well judged choice.

Umm but when do you finally give up flogging a dead horse and living in hope they will rise.......Take Tesco for instance, height of 490p, and they keep falling after one senior management or financial management error after another, today they are 160p, when would you have got out

The_Earl_of_Streatham

bowlhead99 wrote: »

Well, you do hear about the 12-18 hour days which are stereotypical for investment bankers and you can usually rely on the big banks for at least one high profile suicide a year due to the extreme pressure and stress that the jobs can demand.

But hey, if they're not lifting bricks in the sun all day they won't be breaking a sweat, so it's probably an easy life because you can do it from a desk.

What do they do for all that effort? No minerals extracted from the ground, no crop grown, no widgets manufactured. They create money for certain, then spend eighteen hours a day writing contracts to move it around and collect a commission. What they don't create is new value in the economy.

Then, after all that work, they get it wrong on such a monumental scale that government has to step in and bail them out to the tune of £500 billion to save the real economy.

As to the stress and suicides, perhaps they could do what the rest of us are told to do when we don't like our jobs, get another one; these people are nowhere near as special as they would have you believe. Wouldn't we all have been better off if they'd worked fewer hours?

bowlhead99

The_Earl_of_Streatham wrote: »

What do they do for all that effort? No minerals extracted from the ground, no crop grown, no widgets manufactured. They create money for certain, then spend eighteen hours a day writing contracts to move it around and collect a commission. What they don't create is new value in the economy.

Well, crops and widgets are relatively less popular in today's economy than the service sector, because nobody wants to work digging a field or bashing some metal for as low a price as people in poorer parts of the world might be willing to accept.

So, we are less globally competitive in agriculture and manufacturing as we once were (there are exceptions of course), and a large part of our economy depends on the service sector including financial services.

A modern economy supporting private enterprise is not competitive without functioning capital markets. If the world hadn't already developed the way it had, I guess we could just try communism where the state owns everything and decides what jobs to give everyone and closes the borders so that international private trade isn't feasible. However, we're not in that situation and therefore capital markets need to exist.

You may not really understand what functions an investment bank performs in capital markets or an economy generally other than "moving money out of my hands to theirs" and therefore you characterise them as valueless or perhaps of negative value; this naivety is cute but not really excusable. Perhaps they should all just go home. Or employ more people so they could do fewer hours each, with greater total employment costs and using a wider pool of people rather than just the smart ones

Malthusian

bowlhead99 wrote: »

Well, you do hear about the 12-18 hour days which are stereotypical for investment bankers and you can usually rely on the big banks for at least one high profile suicide a year due to the extreme pressure and stress that the jobs can demand.

The suicide rate for bankers is not unusually high. The most likely professions to kill themselves in the UK are farmers, doctors, dentists and vets. In other surveys which try to rank suicide rate by profession, financial services usually does feature in the top 10, but consistently well below healthcare professionals.

The most important variable in determining a profession's suicide rate is not stress but access to the means. Hence healthcare professionals are consistently high, even vets, and coppers have a high suicide rate in the US but not in the UK (where they don't have easy access to firearms).

But the words "high profile" are of course key as the suicide of a rich banker is more likely to appear in the news than that of some lonely farmer.

Most financial services people who work 12-18 hour days do so because it's expected of them and because everyone else is doing it. It's not like doing an overtime shift at a factory. I had a financial job in which I had to burn the midnight oil occasionally, and most of it was spent sitting around, waiting for someone else who is burning the midnight oil to send you some data. It's all rather pointless, but it keeps dull people with no other interests off the streets.

adindas

There is a thread regarding BBC2 program a few years ago
https://forums.moneysavingexpert.com/discussion/5067517

"Some of the people they followed were doimg better than others but overall it was estimated that only 10% of those that went into it made money consistantly."

People who want to try could belongs to this 10% of the winners. But you could also belongs to 90% who are the looser,

Malthusian

That percentage depends on the timeframe. Over a long enough timeframe the success rate drops to zero.

grey_gym_sock

bowlhead99 wrote: »

Well, crops and widgets are relatively less popular in today's economy than the service sector, because nobody wants to work digging a field or bashing some metal for as low a price as people in poorer parts of the world might be willing to accept.

So, we are less globally competitive in agriculture and manufacturing as we once were (there are exceptions of course), and a large part of our economy depends on the service sector including financial services.

a fall in the percentage of manufacturing in GDP, and a corresponding rise in services, has happened in all developed countries, even those with a more successful manufacturing sector, such as germany. though the fall has been greater in the UK than in some countries: our manufacturing sector has basically been trashed, from the 1980s onwards (under governments of both parties).

but that doesn't mean manufacturing is becoming unimportant. a lot of the fall in manufacturing's "value" is because productivity gains have been much bigger in manufacturing than in services. so we can manufacture a similar amount of stuff, much more cheaply, and it represents a smaller percentage of GDP. meanwhile, in service industries, hairdressers don't cut 10X as many people's hair per day as they did a few decades ago; and similarly for most service industries. manufacturing remains key to improving productivity.

also, many of the more "high value added" services are related to manufacturing. engineering consultancy counts as a service, but it's difficult to have expertise in that unless you also do manufacturing.

and some of the apparent decline in manufacturing is just statistical. when a manufacturing company contracts out some activity, it can suddenly count as a service.

A modern economy supporting private enterprise is not competitive without functioning capital markets. If the world hadn't already developed the way it had, I guess we could just try communism where the state owns everything and decides what jobs to give everyone and closes the borders so that international private trade isn't feasible. However, we're not in that situation and therefore capital markets need to exist.

You may not really understand what functions an investment bank performs in capital markets or an economy generally other than "moving money out of my hands to theirs" and therefore you characterise them as valueless or perhaps of negative value; this naivety is cute but not really excusable. Perhaps they should all just go home. Or employ more people so they could do fewer hours each, with greater total employment costs and using a wider pool of people rather than just the smart ones

finance does have a useful role in allocating capital. but that useful role is limited. as in other service industries, there has been little real gain in productivity in finance. but there has been a huge gain in the percentage of GDP represented by the finance sector since about the 1970s. and this is where the "earl of streatham" has a point: all that extra share of national income that has flowed to the finance sector in recent decades is not payment for any extra value which the finance sector has added: it is simply a drain on the productive sector of the economy.

paul volcker suggested that the only useful innovation banks had introduced was the ATM.

this ties in to my earlier post about the difference between zero-sum games and adding new value. the growth in finance is a zero-sum game: it just add costs to everybody outside the finance sector. which depresses real economic activity, and exacerbates inequality.

dealer_wins

The way most people mess up in this sort of trading/gambling is by chasing a small loss until it becomes a total loss.

Remember that when something is going against you and it might save your skin!!

paddyrg

Things to bear in mind - it's not zero-sum once you account for transaction fees

Professional gamblers know how to pick their games - they never play roulette, craps, baccarat, and other games of chance, only poker and (until they get barred) blackjack. Over the short term, noise fluctuations in stock price is basically a game of chance!

Thrugelmir

grey_gym_sock wrote: »

however, i'm a bit more concerned that concentrated wealth is bad for the rest of us. the more wealth is made by zero-sum games, the less incentive there is to add real value.

Legitimately that's what BTL has become. Why work 80 hours a week to build a business. Leverage with debt and sit on your backside all day instead........