I've always been intrigued by this for a long long time and never done anything about it but everyone has to start somewhere. I know there are risks involved but im just after some info or places to start?

Maybe some good apps or websites where you can practise for free and learn the terminology etc and how it all works......


Many thanks....

Maurizio.

I looked into this ages ago and got nowhere. It might be my attention span, but I think to learn the craft well you'd need to devote a lot of time to it.

I once downloaded an app called Plus500 which lets you practice on real markets but with fake money. It was fun for half a day until I went broke.

Extensive research has shown that predicting a stock's next move (up or down) is impossible. You are just guessing. All the fancy software, consultants, theories, etc., are just money-making schemes for people who are unable to do the predictions.

I buy shares, but the only reliable way to make a profit out of them is by sitting and waiting. If they are blue-chip, the chances are high that eventually they will return a profit, but no-one knows how long that will take.

an interesting article came out last month on the subject of share picking compared to the tracker type investments. They used a 'scrabble score' technique

"An investor that had invested US$100 in January 1969 in a strategy where portfolio weights were determined by a stock’s market capitalisation would have seen this initial investment grow to US$7,718 by the end of 2014. However, the same US$100 invested in a portfolio where the weights were determined by the rules of Scrabble would have grown to US$14,108."

Monkeys and Scrabble!

It pretty much underlines what the Enforcer said

A friend of mine uses a site iii.co.uk. You can have a tax free share isa of approx £8000. Any profit made on this is tax free.....he has made an initial 2k up to 6k ish over a few years playing about

Save your money in cash now, wait til the next recession, smash the saved cash into shares of the big companies when they're priced low, watch the price soar as the economy recovers. Sell the shares for cash, wait for next recession and repeat.

This is not financial advice!

I just finished interactive investors (iii.co.uk) identity (which will roll out this year), from what I can tell you can try it out with a dummy account and even compare your trading with other traders, the idea of sharing knowledge.

And as the very old saying goes, only invest what you can afford to lose!

Bought some oil shares a few years ago. Not doing particularly well at the moment

I'm about to invest in a company selling Anti-radiation suits & Geiger-Muller meters.

Ditto what Enforcer said. I read the Fast thinking-Slow thinking book by Daniel Kahneman and one of the conclusions (following extensive research) was unsurprisingly "never to entrust your money to a stockbroker" http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books...our-brain.html.

On the same principle that the bookie never loses, it seems to me that it's only really the stockbrokers and investment banks who consistently make the serious money (taking their cut regardless of the outcome).

Also there'so much mis-information on company and countries performances that it's a bit of a lottery without some inside (albeit not insider) information. I always think that if major auditors can be conned despite supposed due diligence and companies acquiring others like HP duped so epically by Automony that there's little hope for the likes of us ever getting a sound view on what's worth investing in.
If I ever find myself starting to believe that investors know what they'd doing I just remind myself of the sequence leading up to the 2008 freefall. http://www.theguardian.com/business/2008/dec/28/markets-credit-crunch-banking-2008.

That said, I wish I had the secret of the founder of Foxtons boss who sold up for £360m with perfect timing a month before the crash...