I am somebody who loves to invest money on the stock market. Some might see this as a bit of a gamble which in a way it is, there are however certain steps people can take to limit this risk which may well help them to make money.
I should point out that I am in no way a professional investor; I am in fact a stuttering therapist and I also work on projects to do with helping people to learn how to play the guitar and an affordable web promotion service.
The stock market is rather like a fair ground rollercoaster ride in the way that it is always going up and down. It has many peaks and troughs which can make it hard to know when it is the right time to invest or to sell. Some people see an event such as the terrorist attacks on September the eleventh, where the stock market fell in a big way, as a good time to invest where as other people may panic and sell all of their holdings in case of another attack.
I personally prefer to buy when the market is going through a bad period as I believe it is likely to eventually pick up and should if history is anything to go by, be even higher in the future. My way of thinking is buy low, sell high.
When purchasing a single stock, such as shares in one of the top companies such as Vodafone, I always remember the price that I bought the shares at and give the stock a target price. This is the price that I will sell at, if it ever reaches that level of course. There have been numerous occassions when the greedy side of my personality has been extremely tempted to hold onto these stocks even after they have reached the “target level” in the hope that they could make even more money. I am normally able to keep to my plan of selling high and when I have let temptation get the better of me and have held on to the shares they always seem to end up falling back. I hope that I have now learned my lesson for the future, I think I have!
If the share price after for example three months has fallen by about twenty percent, I then increase my holding by purchasing even more shares. I will then set a new target level and just repeat the process. This in a way is similar to how a unit trust works through the method of pound cost averaging, where you are able to purchase more units when the unit price is lower for your monthly premium.
What I do and have explained above is quite risky and you need to be able to hold your nerve when the stock has a bad run. You also need to have a lot of patience. I certainly would only advise people to invest money that they can actually afford to lose as one day for example I could invest in a stock which does not recover. This idea would then turn out to be some sort of nightmare which would leave me well out of pocket.
So far I have been quite lucky and the plan has been working well for me. Compared to a lot of the people that I know I am actually quite a small player in this whole stock market game and I have to say that I personally see it as a hobby than something more serious.