Impulse buying shares I3 ENERGY PLC

Thrugelmir

123mat123 wrote: »

Apologies for ramblings and to any Chinese who read these....

The British can hardly comment.........

Ciprico

Thrugelmir wrote: »

The British can hardly comment.........

fair comment - but there are 1,300M Chinese, and a mere 56M British...

seacaitch

sevenhills wrote: »

Just curious to know if its just me that gambles with investments?

I don't claim to know anything about shares, how can Joe public do anything else but gamble when they buy shares.

What's your purpose in doing this?
Is it for the thrill you get from gambling or something else?


I'm a bit unusual around here (and vs. the population in general) in that the bulk of my "net worth" so to speak was generated by investing in single name stocks. It sounds like my method was a lot different to what you describe as your "Impulse buying":-

I performed very large amounts of research (often but not always in conjunction with others), and giving up my day job along the way to give me the bandwidth, to find situations where the market was not operating efficiently leading to significant pricing anomalies. The inefficiency could have come about through a variety of factors (eg. small capitalization stocks where Instis couldn't obtain liquidity, lack of analysts or weak/lazy analysis etc) resulting in the market having a big information disadvantage compared to anyone paying much closer attention, and magnified by conservatism bias making the market very slow to adjust to and price in changing conditions...

Looking at the ~15+ year period where I followed this type of approach, I had roughly one handful of enormous winners that increased by an order of magnitude or more; plenty of middle-of-the-road (modest to very good) profitable positions; a fairly low number of losers, which by application of a strict selling discipline were never allowed to turn into damaging losses. Looking back, the huge winners usually involved something of a paradigm shift occurring in the companies' markets, such that the initial mispricing was large and lasting even as the stock price increased substantially; this produced strong/persistent price uptrends that were hugely profitable for holders staying the course.

I've not followed that specific investment approach for quite some time so I don't know what the opportunity set would look like today, but suspect that a combination of low interest rates and better information mean there's not as much potential, but that is just a guess. I no longer fish in those waters so really don't know.

My good fortune was in trying to apply this method at a time when the opportunity set was ample and some secular trends meant that what I hoped could be profitable purchases turned, in a handful of cases, into unexpectedly massively profitable situations. I'd say there was an element of "luck being the intersection of preparation and opportunity", but since I didn't manufacture these uptrends, merely followed them as they emerged, there was certainly good fortune involved.

For good reason, this forum isn't focused on that type of investing or speculation because the evidence suggests most won't fair so well. Instead, this place is focused more on people adopting sensible, long term behaviour and plans aimed at delivering financial security in later life with a very high probability of success. "Financial security in later life" is too serious a business for most people to be taking too many chances on because the downside of failing can be so great, with no way to recover from once your most productive years (earnings potential) are behind you. Not something to gamble too much with.

Thrugelmir

123mat123 wrote: »

fair comment - but there are 1,300M Chinese, and a mere 56M British...

I doubt that all the Chinese suffer the same health issues. Vast majority still live in relative poverty. In this country we have a lifestyle choice.

Afraid_of_Kittens

I sold all my shares - platform fees and dealing fees ate too much of my profits.

Stuck the lot into a stocks and shares ISA instead with 5 different tracker funds.

Afraid_of_Kittens

I hope your gamble pays out.

I used to buy shares in mining companies. Had some outstanding returns where 2p shares became £10 or £20+. Used to research the companies, the deposits they had leases on - great fun when they made it big - only used to buy under £200 of shares at a time so never became fantastically rich. More duds than hits though over the years.

missymouse

I am very tempted. Which company do you use as your broker. I signed up with the Halifax as I didn’t want to pay an account charge but haven’t started yet.

I was interested in the JARA fund which was launched this week.

sevenhills

AnotherJoe wrote: »

What do you mean, from supermarkets to oil? It's not a spectrum !
FWIW if I was asked which two sectors people shouldn't invest in, guess what they would be ?

I have held Morrisons and Sainsburys shares before, more than once; I generally sell after I have made at least a 30% profit

sevenhills

123mat123 wrote: »

Bought Sainsburys just after the ASDA deal failed on the basis markets overreact to bad news. They then fell further.
Starting to recover now and do provide a reasonable dividend....

I have had Sainsburys twice before, the ones that I have now are 2% down, they will most likely recover.

sevenhills

bowlhead99 wrote: »

Investing in such shares can be a gamble, but without the immediate payoff of going to a casino - at the casino you would place your bets and get paid almost immediately, while in the stock market you have to wait longer for a meaningful gain or loss.
But if you don't know anything about stocks and don't have any interest in doing proper research, then you are not really doing it for the reward of it being a 'hobby', so you might as well place a bet at the bookies (which are likely to be fair odds because of a competitive market, despite being stacked against the punter) or a casino where the games have fixed and determinable odds.

I like the fun/ hobby aspect of it so I have 20+ individual company holdings across my ISA / pension / unwrapped investment accounts, and some of them are much higher risk than others - but most of my money is in funds or investment trusts or similar.

Historically shares have gone up, the gamble is not owning the shares, but just owning a limited number. The bookmakers make money from punters, your money is not likely to increase.