Stock market dealing

[Justin Passing]

Just in an idle few minutes I thought I'd point outthe obvious to those who think it's a horse race and you have no idea what's going to happen.
I picked a ho-hum stock, for a fairly large company, which hasn't been doing well. It happens to be Macy's the big US department store.
You can get a good idea which stocks are likely to have been "doing well" buy looking at the "Sector" performance charts, which are available.
If you only want to buy rising stocks (ie no "shorting") then you'd have a better time in a doing-better sector, so Macy's would be a poor choice.

There are many many "indicators" you can apply to charts. You can become a "Chartered Chart Technician". Such people do very well indeed by analysing the charts. The clever individuals have 6 or 7 figure annual incomes, the very clever ones start companies and work towards becoming billionaires.
Even using one of the simplest indicators, you can do fine.
Here's Macy's chart, with an indicator line which is a simple moving average. It works on previous data, ie the yellow line doesn't move after it's drawn. So, in a sense it just draws what you can see for yourself. You can change the period of the moving average (ie averaged over 10, 30, 200 periods of whatever you choose) and use a few at once, to get a clearer picture.
The "Rule" with moving averages, simplified down, is to buy when the price turns up and goes through the moving average. You can wait until it drops through again to sell, but you're usually better off selling when the price is turning back to the MA, and has just peaked or has gone flat.

The blue line is the price, the yellow line is the 5 day moving average, and my red squiggles show what would have happened if you'd followed the rule. The red dots are where a bit of judgment would have improved the sell prices.
The whole period is 9 months, and the biggest rise, bang in the middle, is 16%. I guess the total would be +30% or so.

View attachment 317122

 

[Justin Passing]

The Marks and Spencers Trade is doing OK. I closed the short-selling position at about 216 and rebought "long". It's up again about 3.5% so far.

It turned back 0.5% on gloomy general news so I sold again - holding until we see which of the bounce or the mood wins

 

[blup]

That's the way the world works, to the extent that it works around money. MOney isn't something just for getting a house to live in or food on the table, for the machinery of living. It's manipulated, used, controlled by people who know how. If I at my tiny level can click some buttons and accumulate more of it that I ever could with an "honest day's work", the whole fabric which maintains us is a farce.
It's like a disease that's being supported by the organism which needs it to survive.

It's illustrated by the Marks and Sparks shares. It's an undeerwear shop as far as it has entered my life, but with a few clicks a month I can earn more than any bank or building society would give me. This is not high finance. It may upset JD who squirms in his own slurry of disdain and bitter ignorance, but it's true.
I prove him wrong time and again, and he just shows us what he's made of.

View attachment 317009
This is the M&S chart for the past few weeks. The candles are 4 hours wide, so there are 2 to a working day.
At buy or sell times you look at it on a 1 hour or other scale.
The box is about 5% high. All the six legs are more than 5% high, some nearer 10. I was a bit late on the third B.
I bought originally at the same price the stock is at now, part way up the first rise.
The last order with the dotted line, is still open, set to close at the end of the dotted line, far right. (Automatically, unless I change it).

So by Buying and Selling anywhere near the areas indicated, you come out over 30% up. At all stages there are "stop-losses" set in case of a reversal. You could lose a small percentage if things went wrong - but the point is, only of the current trade, and most of the time it doesn't. It's just a cost of doing business, just like a shop buying CHristmas stock that doesn't all sell and some has to be dumped.
I only used 5K for this one, which gets leveraged to be 25K of shares.
After the first Buy, the next order pairs were done at the same time. I delayed on the 6th so there are two actions there, one S, a later Short-S at the top of the dotted line. Now I'm waiting, the final leg is running at a 10% gain.
The difference between a Buy and a Sell-Short is just a different box to click. It seems odd at first.
[ I explained earlier, but it's like you borrow the stock and sell it at the current high price, then buy the same amount of stock when the price is lower, and give it back to the person you first borrowed it from. May take a while to get your head round.]

SO so far I have about a 35% return on M&S. 35% of 25k is 8750, using 5k of money.
That's around 175% gain, in 2 months, while the SM isn't doing very well, overall.
NoNote that there is no overall gain in the stock price. All it took was looking for the period of the waves, and a stock with a decent rise & fall.
About 8 visits to the trading platform, spread over 2 months, earning me over £1000 on each visit. I did it as a trial. It's called Swing Trading, and is a lot less frenetic than other methods.
BIg boys put a couple of zeroes after the £5k, so they make 875000 on the 500k house inheritance from JD turnng it into 1375000, and wonder why the proles go out to work.
You can automate it, which I don't do beyond the next one or two trades. You can also set alarms on price.

A pretty meaningless graph imo, I do know that the old m and s bought British and kept stores open, the new owners treat it as a piece of of private equity that only exists to make profit.

Blup

 

[Odds]

Have you already seen this - Marketscreener.com - ?

Nice to see Netflix recovering after a dodgy couple of years: nearly 9 million new subscribers despite putting the price for a basic monthly subscription by a quid. It's still less than £100 p/a and way better value than a BBC license.

 

[JohnD]

I see Justin is spewing bile again.

 

[Justin Passing]

A pretty meaningless graph imo,

It's a simple graph, it's not complicated. Dates along the bottom, price on the vertical scale. WHat don't you understand?
It's only meaningless if you don't understand it.
Prices go up and down all the time. You can see that slowly with a "swinging" stock and use it, as demonstrated. Or you can use it at a very rapid rate.
Trillions of dollars are moved every day on the basis of changes similar to those in that graph.
So, your opinion is way off.
Stocks (etc) go up because buying them puts the price up, so they go up more. Then the machines decide they have made enough profit so they sell, so the prices go down again, so machines sell before they've gone down too far. It's positive feedback - unstable.
Any halfwit can make money doing it if they stick to simple discipline. Most people don't when they start, so they lose.

ANother illustration:

That's from Friday end of day, Meta, one minute candles.
The price goes up for half, then down again.
Within that it goes up and down several times on a lower time scale. If you looked on an hourly, or daily, or weekly chart you'd see more levels of going up and down.
If you buy when it starts to turn up, and sell when it starts to go down, you make a profit. Here you can tell when the wave is about to turn because the smaller scale waves are having less amplitude.
Each of the several swings is say 0.25% more than the "spread" (that's between red and green lines) There are about 16 there (you can use rises and falls, ) so that's 4%. It's about 4 hours.
So if you use 5k, which will get leveraged free to 5x that by many platforms, you have 25k making 4% in 4 hours, = £1k. For sitting on your jacksy.
In practice you'd find another stock doing something similar, to add - you have time. You set up the buys and sales in advance.
You can mistime your entry/exit, but if you only trade with the trend of the higher time frame , it doesn't matter, you can just wait for the next small wave.
EG, if the trend is rising and you wanted to sell on the downturn but missed it and the price is dropping, just wait until it comes back up again - it'll be higher. If you screw up or are unlucky you only lose part of one of the several cycles.
There's a bit more to it, about stop-loss settings, but not much.
Try it - you can use a simulator, not using real money.

Have you already seen this - Marketscreener.com - ?

Yes, there are loads of useful free sites. Nothing like a few years ago. TradingView has free and subscriber facilities, and Finscreener, and some others. Hargreaves Lansdown and LondonSouthEast are qg for Brit stocks. If you pay, sometimes quite a lot, you get focused stuff. The other day a free sample tip was that the US transportation sector was for no apparent reason, below par. They suggested UPS was too low. Next day it went up 3%.
Freely available from Sharecast - the CEO of 888 (betting shops etc) in the UK bought a load of their shares. That day (Friday) their shares went up 5%. There are masses like that, you can take your pick. If you did that a few times a year you'd beat building society rates very easily. And pay less tax on the gain, probably.

I see Justin is spewing bile again.

Just because you're too thick and/or ignorant to understand (you never challenge anything I write) is no reason to make yourself look so immoderately stupid.

 

[Justin Passing]

Nice to see Netflix recovering after a dodgy couple of years: nearly 9 million new subscribers despite putting the price for a basic monthly subscription by a quid. It's still less than £100 p/a and way better value than a BBC license.

Odd one that, they'd put out all sorts of warnings about their no-password-sharing ploy cutting users, and other negative stuff.
Their price shot up Friday . I didn't chase it, but went short when it turned and got about 2% out of it with a Trailing Stop. (Set and forget, my fave. Once the spread is covered, you can set stops so whenever it goes wherever it wants to, you win.)

 

[blup]

It's only meaningless if you don't understand it.

Shares are long term investments, I appreciate technology can track many changes in a day, but converting that into transactions is costly and impractical IMO, it’s treating it like a computer game.

Blup

 

[Justin Passing]

Shares are long term investments, I appreciate technology can track many changes in a day, but converting that into transactions is costly and impractical IMO, it’s treating it like a computer game.

Blup

Sounds like you're emotionally disabled, Blup.
Hobbled by an automatic thought, like "you must clear your plate". Even if you've eaten enough. You need CBT!

Shares are not a long term investment. They are only an "instrument" you can use.
If you have some idea thet they're suitable for buying and forgetting for a long period, at the moment there are many who say it would be quite unwise to "Invest" in stocks and shares.

That's where, I believe, most people are just plain illogical. It's deep in the psyche somewhere. There's no reason on earth why "shares" should be long term . People buy them to make money, hoping to make more money than they would in the building society. So how long do you have to hold for your "investment" to be somehow worthy? Ten years? A year? A month? 2 minutes? I've frequently held stocks for under 10 seconds. Institutional investors hold them for milliseconds.

If you're buying into M&S because you just love their knickers and want to be part of the organisation then fine. I couldn't care less, though.
No, you do not need technology to "track many changes a day", beyond a connection.
That way of thinking is based on tropes from the 60's.
If you buy goods to sell in a shop you're gambling, because they might not sell. But people do it because it works most of the time.
Same with used cars. You can improve them and make a profit, but you never actually know you can sell the thing for a higher price.
The way the SM works is predictable, within probability bounds. I've demonstrated that many times, and shown results.
If you want to earn money to enjoy your life rather then "do something worthy", do you think there's something wrong with trading shares?

You said costly - no, it's (almost) free. The costs can be so negligible you may never be aware of anything.
If you use a big respected brokers like Interactive Brokers, the cost is a couple of cents per trade.
So it's entirely practical.

I don't play computer games. Never saw the point. Computer games are designed to make you use up time and presumably get you addicted. The SM doesn't have that aim at all.

You have to be moderately bright, say good GCSE/O level grade, and learn some stuff, then you have to behave without emotion, which not everyone can do. There's a process to go through and it depends what money you start with, but there potential is open to earn what you want.
Yes I know "most traders fail", but a lot don't, they make consistent income. You don't have to be "lucky", you have to learn enough that the luck element isn't significant.

 

[blup]

Lol do you run a pension fund.

Blup

 

[Odds]

Disagree about computer games being a waste of time - top gamers earn big money in tournaments, and a select few can become drone operators for the U.S. military.

 

[Justin Passing]

Lol do you run a pension fund.

Blup

Sure, just for me and her indoors...
I won't be here long so I worked out how much she might need if she lives to 100. Is it there? Yes, sorted.

Disagree about computer games being a waste of time - top gamers earn big money in tournaments, and a select few can become drone operators for the U.S. military.

True. It's the sitting in front of them to get to the next level that leaves me cold.

 

[Justin Passing]

Warning if you boought a bitcoin broker's shares. Eg tickers COIN, MARA, RIOT. People and institutions hold them as a proxy for the crypto currencies themselves. They're going up well, as crypto is gaining respectability. BUt it's gaining respectability because the financial authority in the US, and The UK, are preparing for crypto ETFs (Electronically Traded Funds, ie funds which directly hold crypto currencies like Bitcoin, Etherium and the rest) to go onto their respective stock markets. There are huge names behind them , like Blackrock, which is one of the largest funds in the world.
That means crypto it'll be much easier to hold, via the ETF. Many things, like oil, or sectors such as fnancials, leisure or energy are investable via ETFs very ordinarily.

Some think the exchanges will do well. Maybe.
But when the ETF's are released, folk may hold the ETF, and therefore dump the previously used proxies. Don't get caught holding stock you paid a high price for. COIN has varied in price between 350 and 32, MARA between 80 and 3.5.

 

[Justin Passing]

Opinion among thems what would know best is that the US has avoided a melt-down, for now. Bull (up) market returning.
Bitcoin could go to $100,000 if it takes off. If it doesn't , it'll probably languish around 31.
Interesting chart:

That's the chart for the US main index since the 20's or something, for pre-election years.
The red one is this year. Nothing special then.
There's always an October dip and a rise to xmas.

This market trading thing wasn't meant to be a big thing, but it is addictive. I've discoverd Options, where you punt £650, and either lose most of the 650, or can make thousands. It's hard work to get it right, so I've only done a couple which worked out ok. . I have had a couple of losses, not too much but enough to keep me on the straight and narrow. I clicked a mouse by mistake, and it was an instant £1350 loss. Hey ho.
More interesting is something called spread betting. It's called betting because it was invented to avoid the profits being taxed. It works on the difference between buying and selling prices, so it comes to the same as buying and selling shares.
My tax bill has got more numbers on it. Along with the epigenetically scripted urge which says money is good, is one which says deprive the taxman. Depriving him of a small portion will be a warm fuzzy feeling.

I found a use for some of it. I don't have a family so have been thinking of friends etc for the Will. I heard a mate's son and his wife are having to pay for the test-tube baby process. His son's an ordinary teacher, history I think, so not flush. I bunged my mate enough for them to have a couple of tries. It can be cash he "found he had". It'll be nice if it works.

 

[Odds]

That chart is nothing more than the confused crayon of a child. Is it on your fridge door?