Hi all, Like many other My wife and I have been made redundant due to the virus. We have a gorgeous 2yr old daughter To support, I have allowed myself a very small amount of money to have a go at making a million, why hell make that a billion, on the stockMarket haha. If anyone can help this total beginner with some tips on where to look for hints, help, advice, tips etc that would be wonderful. stay safe everyone! Thanks.
Like anything worth doing, it will take a time investment to learn the ropes. Start with what you know. In your line of work you must come across public companies, begin with understand their business and how that affects their stock. Its a good starting point.
I have many comments about this that I'll be more aggressive about because you have a 2-year old to support. 1. If you and the wife are unemployed, the last thing you want to do is try to turn a "small amount of money" into a million. You have a 2-year old. Pay the bills, feed your kid, live life a little if you can afford to, and find a job. 2. Leaving aside the family you need to support, turning a small amount of money into a million is not realistic. Very few people will do that. You'll hear success stories. You'll hear about people who made a 500% gain, etc. You rarely hear about the people that lose when they're trying to catch the rocket to the moon. A good trader/investor tries to earn 10% a year. Notice I said GOOD there. Probably 90% of people that are active in the markets do not beat the S&P year-over-year. You need to set a realistic goal. How old are you? What age do you want to retire? How much can you and the wife afford to put into an investment account when you both get back to work? What kind of lifestyle do you live? All these are things to consider when thinking about your goals. Make it realistic. 3. If you go into the market looking to gamble, you will hit some, but you're going to lose more money than you'll win, unless you're truly lucky. Let's do a hypothetical. I'll assume you have $10K right now (not gonna figure out the shortcut for different currencies ) since you said you have a little money. You sound like a gambler, so you stick $5K into a stock. It goes up 50%. Nice now you have $12.5K! Your next day trade you win again! Luck is going your way. You're at $15K already in just a few days. You start betting more. The next hype stock you jump into goes up again and you think man, this is so easy! Why doesn't everyone do this? I'm gonna buy a yacht next year! You're sitting with $25K. You haven't lost yet. You put all $25K in because you think you're good at trading. The biotech you were looking at had a rumored covid vaccine and a press conference was coming up that the pumpers were saying was going to confirm it to send the stock to the moon. News comes out minutes later. "Our first round of clinical trials showed no improvement in preventing covid". The stock that was pumped up on the rumor loses 75% of it's value in minutes. You're down to $6,250. You try to put it in another company, you lose some more. $5K. Now you need to find a 100% gain just to get back where you were. This is how most robinhood type traders and new comers spend their first few years. They deplete their account. They reload after saving some more at work. Gambling. Resetting. Putting themselves later in life, with the same amount of money. You basically take your 25-year old self, and waste all your money before realizing at 30 that you need to stop trying, you're going nowhere. Now let's look at a different situation. You start with $10K. You add in money every month. The wife adds money every month. Let's say between the 2 of you that you manage to save $10K a year. Every year you're making 10% doing some reasonable swing trades over the course of months. Never trying to get wealthy, just trying to make safe trades where you make 10-20% over a month or two. Or you get into long-term investments in companies you believe in and shoot for 10% annually. Between 25 and 30 years old you're now sitting with near $100K. Not only that, if you make 10% a year on that now, it's a lot more money than in the other situation where at 30 years old you only have $10K because you reset for the year. 10% of 100k is $10K that you're making just in interest. 10% of that $10K is only $1K. You can see why the more money you're able to save/invest, and the larger your account becomes, 10% annually starts to become a bigger number every year that you're growing. ------------------------ I say this all to you as a gambler myself. I have a separate cash bankroll that I use for my gambling. Casinos occasionally, but mostly regular poker games. If you are a gambler and know that you have to quell that desire, set a very small amount of money to the side every paycheck and eventually that bankroll will be large enough to gamble with and have fun. I suggest picking something like poker where you can study the odds and crush the low stakes at a casino because most people don't understand them. It's a long-term easily winnable game if you control your emotions and understand the odds.
