Recomendations Dummy Accounts for Buyign Shares

Malthusian

Bravepants wrote: »

I don't get it really. Even the best fund managers get it wrong, why on earth would people want to do this thinking they can do better!

Largely the same is true of online poker (most beginners quickly get cleaned out by bots and poker sharks who manipulate their ratings and have several screens open at any one time). But people still do it. Because they want to get rich quick.

Bazofts_Revenge

AnotherJoe wrote: »

If all you are doing is investing £50 a month and not buying and selling into different funds or shares, then you should just start doing it for real rather than delay a year or two whilst you practice at doing something else (buying and selling £50ks worth of shares) that you won't be doing for real.

A dummy share trading account has no use for a scenario where you'll be buying £50 of VLS once a month. If you plan to buy and sell frequently enough you need to practice beforehand, then I'll ask again, what makes a person who needs such a facility lty, think they can beat the professionals ?

Quite simply a 'real' investment of £50 a month in a fund back in around 2005 was all I could afford (who said anything about a delay?). The dummy account worked well for me, I learnt a lot. I now invest anything from £600 to £1000 a month either on a new share or top up another (Minimum investment £1000 charges +Vat =1.5%). I don't expect to beat the 'experts' but I'm getting 4% dividend with 80% in individual shares and 20% in Accumulative funds happy to be level with the experts and have negligible charges. Avoiding the passive funds means I can avoid the companies I don't like or are doing poor and going down the pan. What I find incredulous is the people on here who treat investment as a religion and if you don't follow their way then you are wrong. Had I been all in funds I would be paying £450+ platform charge a year. My funds and ISA cost me £90 a year. In a company pension I do have 2 VLS funds global and European (both minus uk) the main growth I have seen in them is due to currency movements not investment performance.

Bravepants

Bazofts_Revenge wrote: »

Quite simply a 'real' investment of £50 a month in a fund back in around 2005 was all I could afford (who said anything about a delay?). The dummy account worked well for me, I learnt a lot. I now invest anything from £600 to £1000 a month either on a new share or top up another (Minimum investment £1000 charges +Vat =1.5%). I don't expect to beat the 'experts' but I'm getting 4% dividend with 80% in individual shares and 20% in Accumulative funds happy to be level with the experts and have negligible charges. Avoiding the passive funds means I can avoid the companies I don't like or are doing poor and going down the pan. What I find incredulous is the people on here who treat investment as a religion and if you don't follow their way then you are wrong. Had I been all in funds I would be paying £450+ platform charge a year. My funds and ISA cost me £90 a year. In a company pension I do have 2 VLS funds global and European (both minus uk) the main growth I have seen in them is due to currency movements not investment performance.

I don't think it's religion par se, people come on here to get contributors' opinions, and express their own. No-one is saying someone else is wrong, just opinions being expressed.


I've been burnt with shares in the past, yes I learned from my mistakes, but I have other things in my life to think about beyond investing.


I prefer the simple life, global diversification, with auto-rebalancing, a mix of equity and bond funds and I can sleep at nights. :-)

AnotherJoe

Bazofts_Revenge wrote: »

Quite simply a 'real' investment of £50 a month in a fund back in around 2005 was all I could afford (who said anything about a delay?).
.

Its implicit in the requirement for one. If you have a dummy share account to "learn" then thats learning is not instantaneous, you need to spend some time, at least a year I'd say unless you are into day trading big time when perhaps a couple of months would do.

Bazofts_Revenge wrote: »

I don't expect to beat the 'experts' but I'm getting 4% dividend with 80% in individual shares and 20% in Accumulative funds happy to be level with the experts and have negligible charges. Avoiding the passive funds means I can avoid the companies I don't like or are doing poor and going down the pan.

If it was as simple as that, "omit the dogs" then active fund managers would work like this and would beat (on the whole) passive funds. Which they dont. heck there's even an approach I've seen statistically back tested that can work though I've never had the cojones to do, which is buy downbeaten companies to benefit from the overselling when they bounce back or are taken over

If it was a simple as you think, fund managers would just buy the index funds minus what they regarded as dross and it would be a slam dunk. It isn't.

Many reasons for that, for example, a company may be doing badly, its share price falls, you sell (or dont buy), then all of a sudden there's a takeover and the shares double overnight.

Or theres an obvious high flyer, all of a sudden, the wheels come off.

I'm not saying dont buy active funds, or dont create your own (which in effect you are doing) I do a variant of that, everyone does unless they just buy one global fund or perhaps a matched set, but if that is your aim, how much practice would that take to even have a clue? Several years? Well, there's your delay then :-)

Bazofts_Revenge wrote: »

Had I been all in funds I would be paying £450+ platform charge a year. My funds and ISA cost me £90 a year..

Choose a different platform?

Bazofts_Revenge wrote: »

I do have 2 VLS funds global and European (both minus uk) the main growth I have seen in them is due to currency movements not investment performance.

And your point is? Over the last year only, that would be true because of the fall of the pound What about the years before that? For example, to take VLS100 heres the last 5 years most recent last.
27% 4% 16% -1% 30%

Only the last one (30%) is significantly due the fall in the price of the pound to any great extent, before then it was around 1.5 and a few% either way. But in any case, thats inevitable with foreign shares whether they be shares or funds. If you say that the performance of your VLS is only due to the pound, you are only looking back one year.

To get back to the original question, I dont think a trial trading account helps unless you are going to day trade.
If you are going to buy and sell over a period of months to years, first you'll need years to see how that pans out and second the shares you bought and sold for practice a year ago wont be the ones you'd buy and sell now.

elephantrosie

i use tradehero app. try it. you can even communicate with other virtual traders there.