£8000 bank,1,2,3 or 4 methods?

[D.Gilberto]

Learn to buy stocks. If you learn how to do it properly, your £8000 is safe. If you try anything else, you are likely to lose your money. Even the relatively safe FTSE100 stocks move hugely if you know how to pick and time the right ones. Once you get that right, you can increase the risk and reward by taking out well timed spread bets on them. Forget about speculating currencies and indices. Those are more exciting to play with. But they will wipe you out.

Advantages of stocks are that if you get the timing wrong, you can wait indefinitely for them to come good. Also, when doing spread bet of them, they move relatively slowly and give you more time to act. You wouldn't have to worry about losing your shirt while you sleep either because stock spread bets don't trade or move out side of market hours. Lastly, stocks allow you to make use of your ISA allowance.

In a hurry to make money is what wipes out most people. Don't go there.

Terrible advice. I only assume no one else picked up on this nonsense because you`re ill experienced....

 

[Walter Mitty]

Terrible advice. I only assume no one else picked up on this nonsense because you`re ill experienced....

When you`re not so ill experienced you will be able to highlight some other parts of BJ's post and fling a little more dirt at him.:|

 

[Hoggums]

Learn to buy stocks. If you learn how to do it properly, your £8000 is safe. If you try anything else, you are likely to lose your money. Even the relatively safe FTSE100 stocks move hugely if you know how to pick and time the right ones. Once you get that right, you can increase the risk and reward by taking out well timed spread bets on them. Forget about speculating currencies and indices. Those are more exciting to play with. But they will wipe you out.

Advantages of stocks are that if you get the timing wrong, you can wait indefinitely for them to come good. Also, when doing spread bet of them, they move relatively slowly and give you more time to act. You wouldn't have to worry about losing your shirt while you sleep either because stock spread bets don't trade or move out side of market hours. Lastly, stocks allow you to make use of your ISA allowance.

In a hurry to make money is what wipes out most people. Don't go there.

I've highlighted the bad stuff for you Mitts, to save you a little time.

 

[Walter Mitty]

I've highlighted the bad stuff for you Mitts, to save you a little time.

But you forgot BeginnerJoe.

 

[The Leopard]

Terrible advice. I only assume no one else picked up on this nonsense because you`re ill experienced....

Really Shrimpy, are you still sore about the way Joe thrashed you in the trading contest, and demonstrated that he has a big, swinging wanger?

 

[NVP]

Its perfectly feasible that you could make a reasonable return from an EA, but that does not mean that the EA is "working". Try trading a bunch of purely random EA's for a few years and you might begin to understand what I mean (ironically you will probably end up trading systems that are random, but you might mistakenly assume that they are not random which tends to obscure and confuse whats actully happening !)

I think there's a lot to be learned from trading EA's and retrospectively analysisng result. Its well worth taking a couple of thousand bucks and allocating that as the cost of education.

I trade mechanical systems almost exclusively these days, and yes, it is possible to make good returns from very simple systems if its done correctly, but at some stage you'll need to break free of relience of commercial EA's and either start to trade manually, or get coding.

I will warn you, its definately not easy and it'll consume more time and resources that you ever thought possible, and its FAR harder than discretionary trading (and I personally believe not possible to develop automated strategies until you are a successful discretionary trader anyway).

If you are going for EA's then I'd advise staying clear of these things that achieve a high win rate by skewing risk reward (which is most of them). The reason is they complicate statistical analysis of the results due to the sample populations not containing enough losers.

Fecking A to the parts in Red above .......come back my MIA MT4 programmers...... all is forgiven

N

 

[peakoil]

Hi Julianthompson,

I've just come to this thread and would like to offer some advice which I hope will be useful to you. Firstly, the others who say 'forget about buying any systems' are correct. No long termer in this game buys a system, and so, as you're someone new to this, you shouldn't go near them either. When people say, "who'd sell a system that purports to make money when they could simply keep it all to themselves, sit back and watch the paper print itself?" they are absolutely correct. Forget buying any trading systems. Period.

Secondly, there is a lot of negativity in this thread. Please, by all means examine why but don't be discouraged by it: Remember that the winning trader has to start somewhere too! None of us likes the thought that someone can come to this game and expect to make consistent easy money, because we all know how difficult that is to master. Anyway, don't take anyone's negativity as personal. It isn't!

Thirdly, try to find a friendly someone who has over 5 years experience and get their permission to shadow them for a few hours, and preferably during market hours. Ask them what they would advise you, knowing what they have learnt in all their time, and to please explain why they took or didn't take some of the trades they took or sat back on. This experience will be worth several books to you! However don't take such an experience simply as a shortcut to reading the best books.

Lastly, you will need deep pockets, the ability to accept that you are wrong sometimes and harder still to profit from it, & lest one forget - even deeper patience! But I must stress again, the worry of others here: 8k in the hands of a newcomer is potentially lethal. Of course, to an experienced trader this is enough money to make a lot of good money particularly if margined well. But by coming to a forum such as this, open minded and willing to learn, you've made a good start. Good luck.