ive made £19'000 this week sat on the toilet

[alittlethyme]

In imaginary money Trading in stocks, shares and commodities Mainly while on break at work. Aibu to think it can be this easy to make money? Aibu to save my treat money up for weeks and do it for real?

How much imaginary money did you play with to get to £19000?

Oooo I love a new game, what's it called?

This week has been a very easy week to make money thanks to QE. I've made a good chunk of real money but I invest for the long term (20+ years) and this week has been an anomaly! It is not normally anywhere as easy as this!

I'm not sure if your post is serious or not, but if it is, the stock market can be great fun but if doing individual stock picking, never ever invest more than you can afford to lose.

I started with 10k, sadly I think with the fees you need big money too make anything. If I had 200 to play with it wouldn't go very far, or allow me to spread my risk. Wish I was a millionaire then I could afford to play the game

Last week a lot of cautious traders lost their accounts following the decision by the swiss to stop pegging the swiss franc to the euro. It's OK when you are on the right side of the market... (been paper trading financial markets for a few months now).

To give some perspective. So far this week I'm up 10% (and that will likely increase over the course of tomorrow). That's how much I was up over the whole of last year. Definitely not a usual week!

Taz what are you investing in long term? An unmanaged fund? Or individual shares?

I'm sick of my job, I want to become someone that makes money shifting numbers on a computer screen.

There was a woman who played a game like this and made shit loads, in real life it did not work out so well, I saw it on a TV program.

I would love to get into stokes and shares myself though.

alittlethyme The bulk of my money is invested in proper managed funds. My current favourites are Neptune Mid Caps, Jupiter Europe, Jupiter UK Growth and Neil Woodford's new fund.

I have a certain amount of money that I invest each year in individual shares- it's just play money and I don't care if I lose it. I have fun with the individual shares- I like following the stories around companies. Some of these shares do really well and some sink. Overall I do OK with my individual investments but I'd not trust myself to stock pick with an awful lot of money!

(for the fairness of disclosure, I was raised by a stock market fanatic and have turned into one myself. I've held shares since I was 15 )

Thanks for that, its all very interesting :)

Trading is a zero-sum game, so apart from the operators, if a few people make a thousand profit, some other people have made a thousand loss.

Most people are mug punters and make a loss.

IamTitanium
not for serious inverters but it can be fun to have a few shares that have perks attached, eg I have Signet shares (bought for £50 - no idea what they are worth now) which gives me a 10% discount at H Samuel and Ernest Jones, as I have two nieces it has been useful over the years and has saved my more than £50.

Pigletjohn I dont agree as for many indexes the general trend is up, the economy must always grow, and if it doesn't the government will print money to make it grow. Isn't the FTSE 100 more than recovered from the last crash?

We got an email from a fund company we invest in saying that if you had any holdings in a particular fund its value had now sunk to such a low it would be unlikely to recover to a positive value. Luckily we don't have any holdings in that fund. I don't know what the minimum investment would have been, but more than £10K.

alittlethyme I suspect pigletjohn is talking about day traders. Lots of people dabble in day trading and lose because novices tend to panic when their shares drop and sell at a loss- someone else then swoops in and picks up a bit of a bargain (assuming it's not in free fall), and they tend to be greedy and hold onto shares for far longer than they ought to (then losing out when it falls). The successful day traders set themselves strict buy/sell points and don't get emotional about the stocks and how they are doing. They view them as pure numbers.

It's lots of fun watching the day traders when a new company lists. You can see them piling in £40k/£60k etc when the market opens and then as soon as the price has gone up a bit (usually within the first 90 minutes or so) they all pile out again, having made a tidy profit.

I thought your thread was going to be complaining about those job adverts that you see on comments sections sometimes- e.g - My sister makes $1,000000 dollars per day without leaving the house' or whatever crap they are on about. They get right on my nerves!

Yes it's been a funny week, my (real) portfolio is up quite significantly as well. It's definitely not always like this! Remember that if you trade regularly you will lose quite a lot in the costs of buying/selling; also that funds charge fees and brokers also charge fees for you to hold funds/shares with them. Make sure that you use up your ISA allowance first if you do it for real. If you invest relatively small amounts regularly (e.g. every month) that can help a bit to smooth out the fluctuations in the market.

Traders are gamblers, not investors.

Aibu to save my treat money up for weeks and do it for real?

Yes. If you made 19K in a week, the odds are somewhere in the region of 50:50 that you could have lost 19K.

I suggest you read a few of these books before using real money.

"Market Wizards" and "New Market Wizards" by Jack Schwager. These are a series of interviews with mostly hedge fund managers, mostly from the late 80's and early 90's, but they will give you some idea of how difficult trading actually is.

"A Fool and His Money" by John Rothchild contains some amusing anecdotes on a similar theme. My favourite quote is from a Chicago commodities trader:-

When I first came down here I was Mr Big Ego. I had a law degree and here were all these ex-cops and truck drivers and people with 200-word vocabularies trading in the pits. I figured I'd make a killing, right? With this competition, how could you lose? Then I get the shit kicked out of me. Then I get the shit kicked out of me again. You know what I learned down here? Humility. Discipline. You come into this business with any sense of superiority, and you're dead. Sooner or later you find out who you are. That's what this game is about, finding out who you are. People say the market's this or the market's that, and they begin to think they can understand it. They discover they're wrong. They can't understand it. The market is ... the market is God

For a clue as to why people are clueless about their own level of incompetence, try "Fooled by Randomness" by Nicholas Taleb.

Lastly, for a mainstream book that explains why even investing (as opposed to the trading you are talking about) is so hard, try "A Random Walk Down Wall Street" by Burton Malkiel.

Pigletjohn I dont agree as for many indexes the general trend is up, the economy must always grow, and if it doesn't the government will print money to make it grow. Isn't the FTSE 100 more than recovered from the last crash?

The OP is talking about trading, not investing. Putting money into a stock index with the expectation of getting 4%-6% more than inflation, with average luck, on average over a number of years, is investing. The return comes from the economy. Trading involves getting higher returns by making correct calls about the future, if you do well it's because you've taken money off someone else who made the wrong call/took the other side of your trade. The money does not mostly come from underlying economic growth.

To be clear: 4%-6% per year.

Thanks I will give some of those a read before I start speculating.

I'm playing with cdf I think its called, contract differentials futures. It is just speculating but if I just wanted to play with 100 quid perfectly possible. I did short the ftse100 when it hit a high then sell this morning for 4k imginginry money.