Professional And Private Investors Are Different
The internet is full of information on share trading and when I started I took a lot of it to heart.
After trading for a while I began to question a lot of what I was reading as it sounded sensible but did not relate to the reality that I was seeing.
So I created this web site as a place to publish my experiences and the views that I have formed as a private individual actually buying and selling shares with my own money.
Some of the pages may appear odd as they address issues that may not even appear to be an issue to people new to share trading, these may be the most valuable pages.
Having traded since the early 2000's I hope that this site is at least thought provoking even if you disagree with it.
Since then the two biggest issues that I found with the information readily available were
- Most of the information seems to relate to trading by professional fund managers who have much more money to invest than I have and for a much longer timescale, they can regard 20 years as the blink of the eye.
- Almost none of the information that is more relevant to the private investor is backed up by the author having used their own money to do whatever it was they were recommending.
A typical example would be an article such as 3 reasons I’d buy Aston Martin shares despite its latest news which ends with ...neither the author or the publisher have a position in the shares mentioned.
One of the reasons for the dearth of relevant information is surprisingly obvious, before on-line share dealing there were very few private share traders. So there has only been a short period of time for anyone to gain and publish their experience.
Pre about the year 2000 there were dentists, solicitors, headmasters etc with shares but they were bought via brokers, generally taking the broker's advice on what to buy and then holding those shares until they retired.
Once you get to the point of investing your own money what is really telling about the advice and services available is that I have yet to see a financial advisor or wealth management company offer to reimburse some or all of your losses.
Clearly there would need to be caveats on any such guarantee but why are there no such offers?
This is of course a rhetorical question.
Is this because the "Golden Rules" that everyone knows even before they start trading may not actually be true;
- Shares should be bought for the medium or long term.
- Shares should not be bought for the short term.
If this were so clearly true then it should be possible to offer the above guarantee.
The belief that buying for the short term is always bad is very seriously questioned within the Short Term Holding section of this site and the the idea that buying for the medium or long may be inappropriate for the typical private investor is also examined.
I still regard myself as inexperienced, so there may be useful information here for people who have been trading for a while as well!
Although there isn't an open forum, as I have yet to see a forum that doesn't descend into name calling, poorly thought out posts and blatant lies, there is a feedback section for posting serious comments or questions.