Join for free
Page 2 of 6 < 1 2 3 4 > Last »
MKJ's Avatar
MKJ
Chatterbox
MKJ is offline
UK
Joined: May 2013
Posts: 8,320
MKJ is male  MKJ has posted at least 25 times and has been a member for 3 months or more 
 
30-06-2017, 08:43 AM
11

Re: Stocks and Shares?

I'm pretty cautious when it comes to such matters as this. There are a few things about this particular Spread Betting company I don't like. For one thing they rang me up. This annoyed me as I hate being contacted for no reason. The person also wanted to call back in a few weeks to see if I liked the platform and whether I might need help. I told 'her' a few things with one being I won't be pushed into doing anything. Another is that their platform runs in the browser making it fully dependant on their own website functioning. Again this rings alarms bells for me.

Spread Betting is undoubtedly gambling, but there are people who make money and such people can be found on the net. There are YouTube videos of them being interviewed and so on. They don't have any vested interest in any particular company as they don't state outright which company they use. These people must have a huge amount of money to play with. So I suppose it all boils down to finding a genuine company - if there is such a thing.

I've joined 3 companies so far. One has a slow website and really is only suitable for long term share buying. Another runs from an installed program. This one I will be trying out today. The other I have already mentioned where the platform runs in the browser where I have run up a huge profit in just 2 days which is no-doubt too good to be true. But there are others I haven't joined yet such as Barclays Bank.

Margin trading is dangerous but hugely profitable and is the province of sharks by the looks of it. The same shares I used to run up the huge profit with the margin trading company also ran up a profit in the other company where I purchased actual stocks. Instead of £1000s though it was £100s instead. I can live with that. Slow but steady could be the way to go and probably is.

Today I intend to investigate the practice account of the installed platform and to also try to join Barclays Bank. I'm with HSBC but they don't seem well setup for the type of trading I want to carry out, whereas Barclays scores highly with some traders.

Pretty sure there is plenty of money to be made. No rush though.
Realist
Chatterbox
Realist is offline
UK
Joined: Mar 2015
Posts: 9,184
Realist is male  Realist has posted at least 25 times and has been a member for 3 months or more 
 
30-06-2017, 09:34 AM
12

Re: Stocks and Shares?

Originally Posted by MKJ ->
Believe it or not my winnings are now over £5000 - see pic. This has taken me 2 days to achieve.
That's a Demo account !! You can't be this naïve ! Why do you think Demo accounts exist?!!! Why do you think EVERY online gambling website offers your free £10 or more bets?

Wake up MKJ or they are going to cream you.

Originally Posted by MKJ ->
I see Realist mentioning fixing prices so that a stop loss could close you out but surely share prices are the same whatever platform you use?
More naivety. What are you ACTUALLY looking at when you are viewing your screen? You are looking at your Spread Bet Company (SBC) website. That is NOT the stock market.
It is THEIR portal which shows what THEY WANT TO SHOW YOU.

The prices and movements you see there are some way behind actual live stock market prices.

So the system knows:

1. The actual live stock price
2. Your spread bet details
3. Your stop losses (if you have them)

The system can react in milliseconds.

Originally Posted by MKJ ->
I have a few practice accounts with different companies. I have double checked that the shares are of the same value at all times. So surely I am right in thinking actual share prices will not be manipulated?
There are live stock process and then there are levels beyond it. Few get access to the live prices. The prices you see on most stock related websites like LSE and Google Finance etc are usually 15 mins behind live prices.
Most finance brokers prices are the same 15 mins behind, e.g. Hargreaves, TD etc. However they offer a service called "Level 2" (L2) which you can subscribe to/pay for, I think its £400 or more per year and that shows more uptodate info and shows the order books (i.e. who is trying to buy and sell).

I urge you again to reconsider what you are about to do. A Demo account is not a real account. It is NOT the real world and thinking that success in a demo account will equate to success in a real account is utterly stupid.

Let me give you just one example of how you can be creamed.

In the finance world you are a tiny ordinary person (called a mugpunter). You're honest, not greedy and just looking to make some money for good reasons.

Pitched against you are massive institutions who wield literally £billions and have massive buying/selling power. These people are utterly ruthless, bend the rules to suit and get away with all manner of financial skullduggery.

You decide to place a spread bet on Stock X at £1 value betting that it will go down (i.e. a "short"). The bet is placed and before long the share price actually goes up a few pips.
How ? Because those people with huge buying power and who can see your bet and it's stop loss placed a large trade to buy shares and that pushed the price up temporarily.

Your bet is now losing and you will have to concede £1.30 to close it out. But you think, ah it's only a small loss, let's leave it and see if it turns around.

It doesn't, the £1.30 loss now grows to a £2 loss. Now you start to get worried. You hate to lose, to concede and the entire system is predicated on that emotional response in mugpunters. That's why the losses gradually rise in small stages instead of going from 0 to a £10 loss in an instant. People wouldn't accept such huge and immediate losses so just like a fruit machine in a pub they play the longer game, gradually increasing the loss whilst all the time making it appear like it could turn around at any second.

The system is also predicated on a simple campaign of fear. In your demo account you freely trade without a stop loss, because it's just pretend. In the real world that would be somewhat moronic unless you were a multi-millionaire banker as the previous poster suggested.

You could easily lose everything you have very quickly. You have little control over your bet. Place a £10 spread bet without a stop loss and you could be looking at a £1000 loss before you know it.

Because of this they introduced the stop-loss system but that was merely a sneaky way to acquire that vital piece of information, how much is the mugpunter prepared to lose.
Armed with that info they know how far they need to push a share price. Without that info they are clueless. They would be left in a conundrum because obviously they can't rig the prices beyond a certain amount.

But then the system of stop-losses ran into problems. On days when trading was frantic, perhaps when a big announcement was made by a company, like say it was going into administration, the system would not be able to cope. There would be so many people trading at the same time that the share price was moving too rapidly and in big chunks. So say the share price of oil company BP was 50p and you had placed a "long" £10 spread bet expecting the share price to rise and you set a stop loss at 40p just in case.

Then BP suddenly has its huge oil spill disaster. The markets go crazy with everyone clamouring to sell their shares asap.
The SP goes from 50p to 30p in an instant. Your 40p stop loss has NOT been triggered it all happened so fast. Now you bet is spiralling out of control as the share price dropes to 25p then 20p then 15p.

Unless you intend to sit in front of your laptop screen during every minute of every trading day you are at risk of this happening.

So the stop loss system did not have the level of protection that mugpunters thought it had. Spread bet companies were inundated with angry calls from customers saying "why didn't your system trigger my stop loss and protect me?" to which the company's just laugh and say "read the f***ing small print you ignorant and gullible mugpunter"

So yet another system was then engineered called "guaranteed stop losses". These DO guarantee that if the above scenario happens your bet will be treated as if the stop loss had triggered. So it is 100% stop loss protection for the mug punter. But it comes at a price. As a mugpunter you already have to pay the sizeable "spread" between the Bid and the Ask, so you are always on the back foot. With a guaranteed stop loss you have to pay an even bigger spread. The odds are always heavily stacked against you, but that's the same in any gambling environment, no matter how they present it.

The mugpunter always believes the he/she could be the person to beat the system, that lady luck will shine on, and that naivety is what fuels and funds the $billion systems that are in place and which give the ruling elite the wealth and power they have over you.

You can not beat the system.

It is run by computers which are hard-wired to the stock exchange and which receive info about price movements before anyone else. A little bit of research would tell you this. Those systems can analyse the movements and make buy/sell trades in split seconds. They can not be beaten.

Last piece of advice

Whichever spread bet company you choose to use, the first thing you should do after depositing any real cash, is to make a withdrawal. Vitally important. Withdraw £100 and check to see how that process actually works and how long it takes and how easy or hard they make that process.
If getting your money back out is in any way difficult, walk away.

Work on the basis that you will lose 100% of the money you deposit and that it will be an education. It's then up to you how expensive that education is.

ATB
Realist
Chatterbox
Realist is offline
UK
Joined: Mar 2015
Posts: 9,184
Realist is male  Realist has posted at least 25 times and has been a member for 3 months or more 
 
30-06-2017, 09:50 AM
13

Re: Stocks and Shares?

Originally Posted by MKJ ->
they rang me up. This annoyed me as I hate being contacted for no reason. The person also wanted to call back in a few weeks to see if I liked the platform and whether I might need help.
Did I not tell you that this would happen? They are simply marking you, determining whether you have previous experience, whether you are a professional or gullible mugpunter.

Originally Posted by MKJ ->
Another is that their platform runs in the browser making it fully dependant on their own website functioning. Again this rings alarms bells for me.
So it should but it will make no difference whichever company you choose. You MUST understand the difference between real life and the Matrix. In this case it is the difference between THINKING you are looking at and playing in a global stock market and ACTUALLY just playing a custom built graphical user interface (GUI) that belongs to them.
The 2 things are VERY different. Their "software" is nothing more than a fancy presented slot machine. You are not a live stock market trader, you are simply a gambling user of their system.

Originally Posted by MKJ ->
Spread Betting is undoubtedly gambling, but there are people who make money and such people can be found on the net. There are YouTube videos of them being interviewed and so on.
Hugely naïve. Massive amounts of PR are made for ALL online gambling ventures. Online poker for example has £millions invested in its promotion which includes lots of YT videos of ordinary looking "dudes" claiming to have made riches, includes paid-for celebrities saying that online poker is legit and fair (it isn't!) and so on. It's BS, there to appease the mugpunters. Don't be a mugpunter !

Originally Posted by MKJ ->
They don't have any vested interest in any particular company as they don't state outright which company they use. These people must have a huge amount of money to play with. So I suppose it all boils down to finding a genuine company - if there is such a thing.
Promotion of "spread betting" helps all spread betting companies. Promotion of online poker helps all the online poker crooks. In the end it's all one company, one huge fraudulent financial set up, in true pyramid structure. So of course those at the top of the pyramid will promote the entire concept.

Originally Posted by MKJ ->
Instead of £1000s though it was £100s instead. I can live with that. Slow but steady could be the way to go and probably is. . .

Pretty sure there is plenty of money to be made. No rush though.
You're gonna get creamed mate !
MKJ's Avatar
MKJ
Chatterbox
MKJ is offline
UK
Joined: May 2013
Posts: 8,320
MKJ is male  MKJ has posted at least 25 times and has been a member for 3 months or more 
 
30-06-2017, 09:56 AM
14

Re: Stocks and Shares?

Very good advice no-doubt but ...

I have been researching this shares lark for a while. At first I just placed shares willy nilly not having any clue what I was doing and lost money hand over fist. Restarted my practice account a few times to try and get the hang of it. Then I figured what was needed was company shares with a steady growth over the time they have been trading - say 5 years. The shares have peaks and troughs but overall they always recover and grow. I found a few companies like this. I then looked at these companies to see which had volatile daily fluctuations. More or less whittling it down to one.

The way I look at it - in fact I did this on my last deal - I bought in at a certain price and left it overnight just to see what charges would be imposed in the main. I placed a selling price where I consider the shares will rise to during the day. This morning I was staring at a £2000 loss as the shares dropped further. No panic though and I waited for the inevitable rise. Now I'm looking at a £2000 profit which should kick in very soon.

The point I'm making is that because the shares of this particular company have a steady growth even if the shares had kept dropping many £1000s they would recover - unless the company or stock exchange collapses in some way. This company is a global concern and dealing in leisure which is showing growth overall. So. should the recovery take a few days, weeks or even months for that matter I wouldn't lose.
Realist
Chatterbox
Realist is offline
UK
Joined: Mar 2015
Posts: 9,184
Realist is male  Realist has posted at least 25 times and has been a member for 3 months or more 
 
30-06-2017, 09:56 AM
15

Re: Stocks and Shares?

An example of how it can genuinely go wrong
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/bu...-10115157.html

"Mr Zidani was one of the hundreds of customers of the spread-betting giant IG Group holding big bets against the Swiss franc. Those bets went cataclysmically wrong in January when the Swiss National Bank scrapped its €1.20 ceiling against the euro"

"That sent the franc’s value surging, currency brokerages collapsing and hundreds of people like Mr Zidani staring at huge losses for betting the wrong way. The pianist – whose £2 exposure turned into a £5,500 loss – recalls the moment well. Slumped in a chair in his living room in Evesham in the West Midlands, he stared at the numbers on his phone in disbelief. “I looked at the phone and I remember having to sit down because the numbers were going red – £1,000, £3,000. I was trying to press ‘stop’ on the phone and it was just an ‘Oh my god’ moment. I said to my wife, ‘It’s now £3,000, it’s £7,000, it’s £6,000’. It was just up and down. I rang them and I said ‘I can’t pay this’. They said it will stop wherever it stops. I had no control. I was panicking.”
MKJ's Avatar
MKJ
Chatterbox
MKJ is offline
UK
Joined: May 2013
Posts: 8,320
MKJ is male  MKJ has posted at least 25 times and has been a member for 3 months or more 
 
30-06-2017, 09:58 AM
16

Re: Stocks and Shares?

Originally Posted by Realist ->
An example of how it can genuinely go wrong
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/bu...-10115157.html

"Mr Zidani was one of the hundreds of customers of the spread-betting giant IG Group holding big bets against the Swiss franc. Those bets went cataclysmically wrong in January when the Swiss National Bank scrapped its €1.20 ceiling against the euro"

"That sent the franc’s value surging, currency brokerages collapsing and hundreds of people like Mr Zidani staring at huge losses for betting the wrong way. The pianist – whose £2 exposure turned into a £5,500 loss – recalls the moment well. Slumped in a chair in his living room in Evesham in the West Midlands, he stared at the numbers on his phone in disbelief. “I looked at the phone and I remember having to sit down because the numbers were going red – £1,000, £3,000. I was trying to press ‘stop’ on the phone and it was just an ‘Oh my god’ moment. I said to my wife, ‘It’s now £3,000, it’s £7,000, it’s £6,000’. It was just up and down. I rang them and I said ‘I can’t pay this’. They said it will stop wherever it stops. I had no control. I was panicking.”
I have read this beforehand. Not the way I want to trade.

See my previous post.
Realist
Chatterbox
Realist is offline
UK
Joined: Mar 2015
Posts: 9,184
Realist is male  Realist has posted at least 25 times and has been a member for 3 months or more 
 
30-06-2017, 10:00 AM
17

Re: Stocks and Shares?

And another that demonstrates adequately how, when the time comes, your inability to close down the bet will result in massive losses. All manner of excuses will be offered like gremlins. broadband speeds, your own ISP having problems etc. If you can't close the bet instantly when you need to then you're basically f***ed.

http://www.snouts-in-the-trough.com/archives/2296
MKJ's Avatar
MKJ
Chatterbox
MKJ is offline
UK
Joined: May 2013
Posts: 8,320
MKJ is male  MKJ has posted at least 25 times and has been a member for 3 months or more 
 
30-06-2017, 10:08 AM
18

Re: Stocks and Shares?

Originally Posted by Realist ->
And another that demonstrates adequately how, when the time comes, your inability to close down the bet will result in massive losses. All manner of excuses will be offered like gremlins. broadband speeds, your own ISP having problems etc. If you can't close the bet instantly when you need to then you're basically f***ed.

http://www.snouts-in-the-trough.com/archives/2296
No, because the stocks are rising anyway.

I just made another £2,900. My overall profit for 3 days trading is now £18,269.26.

Only a catastrophic collapse would stop the process as far as I can make out. And as I intend to pull out chunks of money leaving only a certain amount everything looks pretty good so far.
Realist
Chatterbox
Realist is offline
UK
Joined: Mar 2015
Posts: 9,184
Realist is male  Realist has posted at least 25 times and has been a member for 3 months or more 
 
30-06-2017, 10:10 AM
19

Re: Stocks and Shares?

Originally Posted by MKJ ->
The point I'm making is that because the shares of this particular company have a steady growth even if the shares had kept dropping many £1000s they would recover - unless the company or stock exchange collapses in some way.
Naïve.

Even the most respected companies can and regularly do fall into difficulty. Regardless, the share prices can be manipulated and are regularly manipulated.

If you go out there without a stop loss, your £2000 loss will become a £4000 loss then a £6000 loss. In your naïve head you think that you will be ok to sit there indefinitely and just wait until the share price recovers.

What will actually happen is the spread company will exercise a little right they have, that was hidden away in the small print. That right is the right for THEM to close your bet at that losing position on the basis that you don't have the funds in your account to service the debt when the share price drops lower.

So whether you like it or not, that bet will be closed off any you will have to pay that £6000. The share price might later recover but it's too late, they made your "margin call" and closed your bet.

This is a system that spirals. You think, "ok next time I will deposit twice as much money so they can't make that margin call". Then all that happens is the share prices are manipulated even further and the losses become bigger and the same thing happens.

You will get creamed mate.

You're playing against the spread already
You're playing against huge investors and institutions who on a daily basis earn their crumb from mugpunters exactly like you.
You're playing a visual GUI which is not the stock market

There are no free lunches except for those that own and control the financial systems
Realist
Chatterbox
Realist is offline
UK
Joined: Mar 2015
Posts: 9,184
Realist is male  Realist has posted at least 25 times and has been a member for 3 months or more 
 
30-06-2017, 10:12 AM
20

Re: Stocks and Shares?

Originally Posted by MKJ ->
I just made another £2,800. My overall profit for 3 days trading is now £18,269.26.
lols yeah in your pretend play account.

Ok I'm going to bow out of this thread now. I've put in a reasonable degree of effort to warn you and explain how and why you will be creamed by the system and the sharks that run it. You believe you know better.

ATB
 
Page 2 of 6 < 1 2 3 4 > Last »

Thread Tools


© Copyright 2009, Over50sForum   Contact Us | Over 50s Forum! | Archive | Privacy Statement | Terms of Use | Top

Powered by vBulletin Copyright ©2000 - 2024, Jelsoft Enterprises Ltd.