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Before you start stock trading: first think if it is worth your time and money

Before you start stock trading: first think if it is worth your time and money

That was the good news. The bad news is that those companies are selling you the tools and service only. They do not sell you any guarantees of success. It does not matter if you profit or lose money, the trading company will get its fee for each trade anyway.

Since you are considering going into the stock market, most likely you are planning to get a significant return on your investment which should also be better than what you would get buy investing your money into mutual funds (less risky than single stocks) or even no-risk certificate of deposits (CDs) where returns are guaranteed.

Well, how can you get such returns? The answer of course is simple and well known: buy low, sell high. If you do it most of the time youll be a successful stock trader. Now the first problem comes: how do you know when to buy? There are probably several ways to do that, we do not discuss this here, lets assume that you know somehow or think you do know. Lets say you got lucky and the stock after you bought it is going up, just as you planned.

Now another problem comes: when to sell? After the stock is up 20%, what do you do? Sell now, or wait until it is up 50%, 100% or 200%? Do you listen to investor news and do what everybody else does: selling, buying more, or continue holding the stock? If you choose one of the first two options, how much of the stock you should buy or sell? Or if you hold the stock, are you sure it will continue to go up, or you may end up waiting until the stock price is back to the original and than lose its value resulting in your losses.

The truth is some people actually do know the answers to those questions most of the time and actually make profit. The question is, are you as good as those people? Most people are losing money guessing and trying to time the market. If youre new in this game and not planning to spend much time on research, chances are you will lose. You will be competing with professional traders, big players and insiders who profit mostly because many others keep losing. Plus what are the chances that you can predict the market? The chances are very slim.

Some may argue: I had that stock, I sold it when it was up 20%, but if I did not sell it at that time, now it would be up 300%. How stupid I was when I sold it, if I did not Id made a lot of money. I have to do this again. It really proves that I can make a lot of money there and its easy! That is right you can make a lot of money, but it is not that easy as it looks. Lets assume you did not sell the stock at the time it was up 20%. Then what makes you think you would wait until it is up 300%? You may have sold it when it was up only 25%. Or it may go down several times below 20% increase, you could have thought it was going down forever and sold it even with a lower than 20% profit.

The bottom line is that it is easy to look at the past and see all the mistakes youve made. However it is very difficult to do right things for the future. Unless you know market trends well, understand related industries and stock company financials, most likely you will not be able to make profitable trades. Even professional traders do mistakes and lose money. If you are not one of them or not planning to become one, your best bet would be investing into CDs, mutual funds or your own business.

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An Introduction To CFD Trading (Part 1)

An Introduction To CFD Trading (Part 1)

Here’s a really simple yet useful tutorial on CFD trading that will get you up and running very quickly if you’re new to CFD trading.

By the time you finish this article, you’ll know how CFDs work, what makes them highly profitable, and understand the costs involved in CFD trading.

CFD stands for Contracts For Difference, which is a derivative product, where you profit from changes in the prices of stocks and shares.

For example, if you buy a CFD on a stock that’s $5.00 and the price rises to $5.50, then you profit from that change in price. So if you bought 1000 CFDs, then your profit is $500. That is, the value of the CFDs mirror the underlying stock prices, and you can profit on this movement.

The reasons why CFDs are a very popular trading product, and understandably so, are:

1. CFDs are traded on leverage, and this leverage is typically 10 to 1, with some CFD brokers providing 20 to 1 leverage. This means that a trader with a small float can make decent profits from trading the stock market by using CFDs. For example, you may have a stock trading system that makes a 30% return per annum. On a $5000 float, this is $1500 profit in one year. With CFDs, because of the leverage, the same system can now produce a 300% return, which is $15 000 profit in one year.

2. You can just as easily short sell CFDs as well, and therefore profit from falling markets. This greatly increases the profitability of a trading system because trading opportunities increase dramatically, and the fact that you can profit from both bull and bear markets.

3. The costs in CFD trading are relatively low when compared to stocks. This is especially so, since for a similar and often smaller cost per trade, you can gain 10 or greater times the results from a trade due to the leverage available. The 2 main costs in CFD trading are interest and leverage. We’ll come to these in a moment.

4. You can set automatic stop losses. This means that it will take you less time to trade, remove the emotion from exiting a trade when you should, and allow you to exit as the stop is hit, not a day later. You therefore avoid the slippage due to getting out of a trade later than when you intended.

5. You can place all your orders in the evenings. With many CFD providers, you can place orders to enter a position the night before. For people who are working, this is a great advantage as they can do all their trading (place their orders to enter and their stop losses) in the evenings, and not need to be at the computer screen or call their broker during the day. Also, if they have any stop losses that need adjusting, they can do so in the evenings as well. Their trading routine with a mechanical system can be about 10-15 minutes per day.

So these are the advantages of CFDs that have made trading accessible to so many people because they provide large returns for a modest float, and can also be traded once a day as well.

Now, we mentioned that there are 2 main costs in CFD trading. Let’s have a closer look now at each of them:

1. Commission. With some CFD providers, there is in fact no commission. This also greatly increases the profitability of your CFD trading systems, as well as the fact that you can benefit hugely from the leverage. With other CFD providers, there may be a commission of say 0.15% of the trade size or $15, whichever is greater, each way. These costs are similar or less than the commission associated with stock trading, especially when you consider that the multiplied profits that the leverage gives you.

2. With CFDs, there’s interest charged for long positions that are held overnight. For short positions, the interest is paid to you. The amount of interest charged is usually a reference rate plus approximately 2%, and the interest paid is usually the same reference rate minus approximately 2%. And the reference rate is usually a major bank’s overnight interest rate.

For example, the interest rate charged for overnight held long positions may be 7.5% or 0.075 per annum. To calculate how much this is for a trade, we need to make it “pro rata”. That is, we’d need to divide the 0.075 by 365, multiply it buy the number of days in trade, then multiply it by the trade size. For example, for a trade size of $10 000, held for 14 days, the interest cost is about $28. Not a huge cost. For a short trade, the interest is paid to you, so will offset the cost rather than contribute to it.

So there you have it.

You now understand the benefits of trading CFDs and why they’re a trading instrument that allows people with a modest float to make very decent returns, as well as understand the costs involved with trading CFDs.

To learn more about CFD trading, watch out for part 2 of this article.

If you’d like to learn more now about CFD trading, go to this page with a comprehensive http://www.thecfdtrader.com/cfd-trading-tutorial.php” target tutorial on CFD trading

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