Investing in stocks and shares for a beginner

Anyone just started out or a seasoned investor?

What are the best sites / books / traders to get started?

Not talking big bucks at all a few k to start with. I have the luxury of being able to be pretty active, and fancy it as a hobby which hopefully could earn me something.

The thing with just a few K is that you are unlikely to make enough money to cover the various fees involved. When you do start investing enough to make a serious return then it gets quite scary!

Register with share.com and you can set up a practice account.

If you have a google account, google finance provides a useful set of tools and info.

for books, it rather depends on how much you plan on researching stocks. The FT used to publish an easy to digest primer, will go to the book shelf and dig it out, one tick….

Try these http://www.hl.co.uk

I’d suggest a stocks and shares ISA.

Only invest whst you can afford to lose.

here we go

http://www.richardkoch.net/2012/11/03/the-financial-times-guide-to-selecting-shares-that-perform/

TBH, even though Ive studied this stuff and occasionally my work touches on it, I pretty much stick a pin in a list of tracker funds or geographic investment funds with sensible fee rates.

IMO, you should be aiming to get rich slow: re-invest divs, avoid highly speculative penny shares.

Although far more boring than picking your own stocks, most seasoned pro’s Advise low cost funds for those starting out.

You may want some fun and be more ‘active’ in your approach.

IANAFA, etc.

the biggest lesson i’ve learnt over the years is to develop a clear strategy (of your own) and most important of all….stick to it.

a few other nuggets….

– don’t follow the heard
– minimize fees
– don’t over trade (to avoid more fees more fees)
– don’t lose your capital
– ignore most of the financial press, use your own judgement

My dad was a stockbroker, and my friends would often ask him this.

His first question was always “how much can you afford to lose?”

http://nakedtrader.co.uk/agree.htm

I use Share.com and Hargreaves Lansdown. The latter I’d avoid as their fees are high and I intend to migrate all my funds away from them this year.

With Share.com, I split my money 15 ways and invested 1/15 in each of the top 15 FTSE100 companies, sort of a DIY tracker. Seems to work ok, if the FTSE rises, so does my fund and likewise when it dips etc.

It’s a long term thing, so I don’t bother looking at it more than once or twice a year.

I wouldnt bother with shares personally I would (and do) invest in funds and pay the management charge. If you max out your ISA your gains are tax free.
Funds dont have to be too risky and I monitor mine daily online and I can withdraw if I need to (sacrifice the ISA if I do)
Fundsmith is relatively low risk and offers steady growth I would recommend that to sart with

You sound like you want to be a day trader/gambler rather than an investor.Repent your sins and read the “Intelligent Investor” by Ben Graham.His insights are still relevant today.

Mind you,with only a couple of K to invest I,d just drop it on CF Woodford equity income.Tick the dividend reinvestment box,kick back,light a cigar and waaaaaaaaaaait.Ten to twenty years should do the trick.Neil.

If you want to invest relatively safely, invest in safe stocks with large companies operating in markets where there’s sustained long term growth potential and protection from recessions. Prepared to investing these companies over the long term.

If you want to gamble then buy some hight risk shares from a company you’d not previously heard of with the promise of high returns. Then either:

A: Get wildly excited as shares increase in value drastically ahead of anticipated glowing press announcement. Shall I sell yet? No they’re still climbing and the announcement is tomorrow, should make even more, best hang on until tomorrow. Okay so press announcement is not as favourable as expected but still good, right? Another announcement due next week. Whoah, suddenly shares not climbing but in free fall. Should I sell? Perhaps not, as not making as much as they were worth yesterday. Obviously a temporary glitch. They should go back up next week shouldn’t they? Oh damn, shares dipped below the value I paid for them, don’t want to sell at a loss, should have sold yesterday but surely they’ll go up right? Oh bugger, 6 months on and they’re now worth 10% of what I paid for them, should have sold them a few months ago at a slight loss! Still they’re cheap now right, can only go back up. Lets buy some more to cover the first loss when they go back up. Oh bugger, 6 months on they’ve dropped again 🙁

or B:

Great, these shares have real potential and the XYZ market is just about to take off in a big way. Hang on a minute why are they going down? That’s strange, must be a temporary blip. Oh, no they’re still going down, don’t want to sell at a loss though. Damn they’re now only worth half what I paid for them. What to do, sell or sit it out I the hope that these go back up again. They must go up again surely? Should I buy more at this cheap price? 🙁

Yes looking at it from a interest / fun perspective which is a little more educated than bunging it on black in the casino.

Currently have quite a Few shares in aviva and enjoying the speculation, looking to make a fair amount and was going to siphon off a few k for more active trading

Completely aware of losing money to, friend recently invested in Russia…and is currently 45% down.

I’ll still have sensible safe type investments as well.

Few words of wisdom from my perspective:

Don’t trade in penny shares, there are no gems, no secret websites or forums. The people who frequent them are usually clueless or trying to get you to invest. You will end up losing money and anyone who tells you they have made a 600% return will have probably lost 10 fold in previous years. You may aswell but your money on roulette.

Don’t trade in commodities you know nothing about. If you think you know the market or read some interesting tips, 99% of the commodity traders are 2-3 days ahead of you.

Do invest in good stable companies and swing towards good dividend payers. Big companies like Unilever, Accenture, Diageo etc all have steady growth and pay good dividends.

Do invest in manage funds. This is the easiest element to do you own research on. Manage funds are steady funds so you have access to past performance, investment porfolio. Find something that aligns with what you think your investment strategy would be and look at their performance. If the two look good, it should be for you.

Out of my porfolio, my managed funds outstrip my own personal stock picks usually to the tune of 2:1. That could be cause I am crap but i tend to believe that the people who manage the funds know what they are doing. Check out Vanguard, M&G and Lionstrust for good funds.

the people who manage the funds know what they are doing.

Or play golf wih the right people 🙂

the people who manage the funds know what they are doing.

These are the same people who when the market is on the up claim to be brilliant and when the market crashes (and their funds go down) blame everyone else.

Very, very few fund manager beat a pure tracker over any length of time.

Don’t invest in penny shares and then spend every waking hour watching them on iii and listening to cave dwelling arseholes on that forum spouting absolute ramping garbage, you will lose money.

Always remember that you are bringing a knife to a gun fight.

Like LHS, I just let the funds that are doing well for me keep running. If you want to trade shares, be absolutely ruthless with yourself. Set your limits and stick to them.

Very, very few fund manager beat a pure tracker over any length of time.

You’re using the wrong fund managers!!

You’re using the wrong fund managers!!

Every time anyone runs the actual numbers they come to the same conclusion.

The research comes from Money Management, a respected monthly magazine that surveys financial products and performance. It found that the vast majority of unit trust tracker funds consistently outperformed the averages, and across all indices and markets.

http://www.theguardian.com/money/2010/apr/17/index-tracking-funds

If you want to follow one of the most successful UK fund managers, Neil Woodford, he publishes his complete list of holdings every month, so you can pretty much copy his fund yourself.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/personalfinance/investing/funds/10965211/Neil-Woodfords-Equity-Income-fund-the-full-list-of-holdings.html

Good thread this…made me remember why Ive never dabbled with my ‘ard earned cash!

Always remember that you are bringing a knife to a gun fight.

Great analogy!

Every time anyone runs the actual numbers they come to the same conclusion.

Joking aside, this is not and should not be the case for your funds.

It names the F&C FTSE All Share Tracker as the best fund over eight years of performance data in the All Share sector. It gave investors a 42.9% return, compared with the 47.5% gain in the index.

42% return over 8 years is not good performance for a fund in anyway. Your expectations should be a minimum 10% year on year return, most good fund managers will bring upwards of 15%.

Joking aside, this is not and should not be the case for your funds.

I’m pretty sure you could prove that most fund managers can’t beat the market on average. If it was relatively easy to always pick winners (ie most fund managers could do so) then the market capitalisation of the winners would rise and the indices would be dominated by them, thus meaning that the fund managers would just track the indices…..

most good fund managers will bring upwards of 15%.

How many fund managers have achieved this year on year over the last 10 years?

A few K and ‘active’ is not a good combination

If you want a little more excitement than putting it in a passive low-fee fund then you could buy a couple of single stocks of companies you like. You’ll then be less likely to sell when they have a bad day. Keep adding to the investments periodically and the short term ups and down get averaged out. (There’s a term for it but I can’t remember it off the top of my head)

Alternatively if you really want to be ‘active’ and still have a chance of covering transaction costs then look at CFDs. But then you might as well just go to the bookies and put it on horses. “No one knows what the short term movements in a share price will be” – It’s all gambling at this point

[small print]By reading this you agree. Not advice, might lose your shirt, house etc, blah blah Financial Conduct Authority, you’re on your own.[/small print]

It isn’t hard to beat FTSE be following recommendations for funds from the likes of HL and Close Brothers but obviously you’ll be lucky to beat it my a big margin. I’ve been investing for around 20 years and just pick good funds.

the people who manage the funds know what they are doing.

Yes, they do. They are risking your money and creaming off a percentage (of the fund not return) regardless of performance. They are not stupid.

Yes, they do. They are risking your money and creaming off a percentage (of the fund not return) regardless of performance. They are not stupid.

They cream off a very small percentage (I would want to be paid for doing a job).

How many fund managers have achieved this year on year over the last 10 years?

Plenty.

Choose the right funds and fund managers and you won’t be disappointed. Invest in wreckless investments and performers then you will.

Some of the well balanced emerging market funds are bringing in excess of 500% return over 10 years. Even the well balanced US indexed funds are bringing in currently 140-150% return over 5 years.

Hi

I’d be happy to share my progress to date offline. Email is in my profile

LHS, you seem very knowledgeable, can I ask if you have a background in the financial sector?

I’ve had a few thousand in Fundsmith since 2010. It’s done better than my trackers. 100% increase over 4 years while investing ina small number of safe companies. Current top ten holdings

Top 10 Holdings
• Microsoft
• Dr Pepper Snapple
• Stryker
• Becton Dickinson
• Imperial Tobacco
• Unilever
• Kone
• Reckitt Benckiser
• Philip Morris
• Domino’s Pizza

https://www.fundsmith.co.uk/TheFund.aspx

If you have UK stock trackers it helps diversify as it is more widely spread. Currently 60% US 27% UK and 13% Europe.

No classical training, just old and been doing it for a long time. I also am lucky to have a number of friends whose job it is to manage family money so I get to listen to a variety of well reasoned investment rational.

There are a lot of funds, some are top quartile over all time period (1, 3, 5, 10 years) while some are bottom. To use the average of the funds to compare to trackers is distorting and bad funds drag the average down and detract from the best performing funds, like Woodford, Nick Train, Fundsmith etc. Horses for courses.

Go for trusts rather than funds if you can to keep costs down only buy when they are at a discount or below there average. A lot of tracker funds with £bns also have high fees of 1% or more, this is more than a lot of funds and IT’s post RDR, so shop around for the right tracker or go for an ETF.

Over price trackers.[/url]

Funds and trust are good for specialist areas of the markets, for income or the risk you want to take. Maybe have an all companies, FTSE 250 or global tracker then add a couple of IT’s or funds to spice it up a bit. I bought in to an Indian trust 7 months a go (NII) and it’s done very well.

Keep an eye on any funds you have if the manager leaves or something changes be prepared to ship out.

The US markets are so highly researched that there are no ‘value bargains’ to be had so only really worth going for a tracker in the US.

I’m with footflaps on this one, but chose 10 from the ftse 100 & not the biggest but 10 that will easily stay in the 100.

Think of the portfolio as a garden, you plant some seeds & some grow, some die. Some stocks do well, some do nothing. The key is diversification.

I am a real meddler though & enjoy the tinkering – you’ve got a divi payment every month usually so you have to decide what to do with it. Look at Morningstar.com to see the 10 year averages – most stocks are c 8% on this time horizon with divi reinvestment.

speccyguy – pound cost averaging.

Also I like the quarterly divi paying stocks like RDSB (currently out of favour so worth looking) & ULVR (currently in favour so wait for a downturn).

Read the Investors Chronicle, some good info in there

OP, very hard to condense into a short reply. You can certainly pick individual stocks for companies you like but I would also suggest you look at ETFs. These offer you the ability to buy “sectors” or “countries” and different markets including say the US, Asia, commodities etc and are quite efficient from a cost perspective.

@Dobo not sure I agree on the US, there are lots of varying opinions and had you bought Apple a year of so back you’d have done very well for example (71 to 120).

I’m new to investing…as in 3 days ago! so learning a lot from this thread…thanks!

So far i’ve invested in a couple of funds with HL and now just looking into FTSE trackers. I’d never heard of them until this thread.

If FTSE trackers just track FTSE listed companies, how do I know which one is a good one to invest in? Aren’t they all just the same? Or is the difference in which FTSE listed companies the fund invests in?

If i sound like an idiot…i am…but i’m only investing small sums until I have learned how it all works 🙂