Member Info for Dofe

Everyone is now waiting to see who pulls the white rabbit out of the hat first.

Doctor Copper will come to the rescue and give the market a vitamin injection.

Bobetts
A long time ago in a temporary advisory role.

What were my impression she of BT then?
The technicians that I had dealings with seemed very knowledgable about their own specialisms and were, in general, very committed, even if they did play the system a bit.
However, my impression of the middle and junior management was dire. They appeared not only completely clueless as to their own role but also seemed to have no real understanding of the business in general. I got the impression of an inward looking company more interested in its own statistics and propaganda than what was going on in the world outside. A bit like a religious cult. lol
Unfortunately, if a business seems clueless from the top down is it any wonder that the market questions every move it makes.
But that was a long time ago and things may well now be different.

The contrarian view would be to back China. If anyone knows how to rig a market then the Chinese are past masters. They also have deep enough pockets.

lol. This has strayed so far from the reason for my initial post that I have lost the plot entirely. It had nothing to do with BT per se, but was to do with the logic of averaging down on the price of a product which was being dumped by buying more stock in the belief that the more stock you held at a lower average price the bigger the potential profit if the market turned. Possibly, but that depends on how far your average price is from the bottom and whether the buyers themselves can also see a profit at that price.
It started with an off the cuff remark I made to a friend when the price was about £2.50. I said that looking at its trajectory to date it was more likely to reach £1.70 before it went back up to £2.70. This raised a laugh and I was bet a bottle of the finest malt that it would never go that low. The rest is history and I won the bet.
However, I wouldn’t buy a warehouse full of flared trousers, say, just because the price had fallen from £6 to £3. And if there was no market for them I wouldn’t buy another warehouse full just because the price has now fallen to £1.50 in order to lower my average buying in price. If I can’t see a return I would just cut my losses and move on to pastures new in order to recoup the loss elsewhere.
If you buy BT now you are possibly buying in at a price that will realise a profit in the not too distant future based on that price. However, if by buying it has merely taken your average down to £2.50 + then you still have to reached that target to break even. If you sell the £1.40 shares when they are in profit then all that happens is your average buying in price for the other shares goes back up.
Anyone want to buy some flared trousers? Top quality going cheap £5 a pair.

Oh well, good luck. I don’t understand your investment logic, but then I don’t suppose you would understand mine.
However, In your position, I would be asking myself:
why, in a stock market that has been rising on the back of virtually 0% interest rates and billions of pounds in QE pumped into the market since 2009 in order to stimulate the economy, which it has done, with the resultant rise in the ftse and share prices in general - why has BT been effectively slowly dumped by the market since 2015/16 when the ftse in general has held up?
It would seem that the market just doesn’t have the same confidence in the share that you have and I would question the logic of using a depressed share in order to park cash in the event of a serious downturn.
Anyway, let’s hope you make the right call.

You might be right in that this crisis is being overblown, and that prices will be driven down to the benefit of the big players who will be positioning themselves for any eventual rebound.
However, is BT really recession proof? Look what happened to its share price during the last recession from late 2007-2009. And have we been in a recession for the last 5 years?
The first lesson my late father taught me was that you make your profit when you buy, not when you sell and not to get suckered in by the big boys temporarily driving prices up or down to either offload unwanted stock by creating a false demand, or, conversely, causing panic selling in order to drive prices down and pick up stock on the cheap.
And yes, I am a trader, but not in this market.

As someone on here pointed out- history has a habit of repeating itself.
The ftse fell from over 6500 in 2000 to around 3500 in 2003.
It repeated that in 2007 when it fell from over 6500 to around 3500 in 2009.
What makes people think that in a market artificially buoyed up by cheap money it won’t happen again?

As a good friend of mine who trades commodities once said:
“ share dealing is reminiscent of the herds of wildebeests migrating across the Masai Mara in search of food. The 5% at the front of the herd get fat on the fresh grass and move on to repeat the process elsewhere. The next 10% trailing behind get the stubble; and when the final 85% arrive all they see is a pile of ****.”
lol

“ the 7% is only applicable to new buyers.....”

Exactly. In many cases the return equates to half that, with a potential huge loss on the original sum invested which may never be recovered.
Strict risk management is the key to any successful investing, not guesswork; and one has to remember - the long term success of BT depends upon many external factors beyond its control, as does its share price.

Lol
Do you realise what the BT share price was in 1999 at the height of the Dot-com bubble and what it fell to several years later? Hardly history repeating itself.

I know nothing about investing, but surely the role of the Market Maker is exactly that i.e to ensure that there is sufficient liquidity in the market in order to keep the market moving, and prices are moved accordingly, dependant upon supply and demand.
If the market itself decides that a company is now a bloated, useless, organisation with no sense of direction it will vote with its feet and shift its money elsewhere. Politics and the general prospects of UK plc aside, witness the number of companies that have followed the same downward trend over the last few years. Those should be your red flags.
You are not investing in the company per se- you are merely buying and selling what amounts to tradeable pieces of paper whose value shifts according to market forces. i.e supply and demand and market sentiment.
The lesson I have learnt following these boards is that everyone’s feels they know more than the market and that the market is therefore wrong. You can’t beat the market, as has been proven.

All you invest in is a trade-able piece of paper, for want of a better term, i.e a share certificate that is sold from one mug to another and priced according to the whims of the market. The investment in the company was done at the time of the initial share offering. The purchase price of your share just went to either the lucky punter who made a profitt on it when he sold it to you or alternatively suffered a loss on the price he paid for it. Unfortunately, the market is seldom wrong and if the share is being marked down there is a reason for it, which may have more to do with the UK economy and its future earnings potential than Vodafone itself.

Thanks but I wasn’t trying to get any answers other than as to whether investing for dividends makes any real sense in a volatile market, or any market for that matter. Every share that was recommended to me, with the exception of one, has fallen quite a lot it would appear, so the idea that dividend yields alone are a reason for investing just don’t add up - to me anyway, on the evidence before me. I have followed these boards, BT and otherwise, since the beginning of 2018 in order to get an understanding of the logic behind the advice, yet I am still none the wiser. If I had followed the advice I had been given then I would have lost a lot of money.
I think you have answered my question in one word-gambling. Gambling to me isn’t investing for the future. It is having a punt and hoping that you have made the right call. It just seems to me that people are confusing gambling with investing- if the gamble pays off they are brilliant investors. If the gamble fails then they are ‘happy to hold on’ to the shares and get the dividends, but reading the posts most are just plain unhappy regardless.
I came on here seeking an opinion hoping that someone would give me a sound reason for coming round to your point of view. The fact that I have merely got abuse just re-inforces my belief that amateur investing is not for me as all I am doing it would appear is giving my money to someone to gamble on my behalf. Think about it.
The fact that I am Scottish probably doesn’t help either. Lol
Best of luck to you all there will be no more posts so you can insult me to your heart’s content.
And to the man who said he can console himself that he is English - the definition of console is to comfort someone at a time of grief, so I am not sure that was the correct word. Proud is much better.

No fake, just a canny Scot now living in the South of England putting up with constant whingers and bullshitters who know everything yet can’t see beyond the end of their noses and admit their mistakes.
I don’t know where you fit into all this as I don’t read all the posts- just generally skim through in order to get a general feel to re-inforce my opinions, right or wrong.
If you, like many of the posters on the other boards, are so clever, then by now you are a millionaire and are, presumably, just idling your time away in between deciding how to spend the proceeds of your wise investments.
Perhaps you would care to share your true investment wisdom with the World at large, otherwise you are at the same level as I am - truly clueless as to which direction a share is heading from one day to the next.
I admit I am clueless and don’t trust the Stock Market. What makes you, or anyone else, feel so superior as to think you know better than the market? The market sets the price- you follow.

Thanks but I have no intention of playing anything. I did have the temerity to suggest a couple of shares myself but was informed that I shouldn’t touch those with a barge-pole. They appear to have done quite well but I assume that was just beginners luck. Unfortunately, I don’t have the complicated tradiing software that can apparently use complicated algorithms to analyse share movements giving me the best chance of investing and losing the maximum amount of money. My choice was more akin to shut your eyes and pin the tail on the donkey.
Also, from reading this, and the various other share dealing boards, it would appear that spending a considerable amount of time in a deep depression is part and parcel of the fun of investing in shares.
As I said, I know nothing about investing in shares but have learnt a lot over the past 12 months from reading these boards, so thank you.

The reason I posted the original question is because a good friend of mine- an ‘investment guru’, or so he would have me believe- suggested at the beginning of the year that, instead of just leaving my money on deposit and getting on with life, I should be seeking better returns by investing in shares with high dividend yields in order to ‘beat inflation’.
I have been following the shares he suggested, including BT and reading all the relevant boards and opinions and in doing so have watched them all slowly go down like a slow puncture. When I pointed this out to him his argument was the same as some of the arguments on both this and other boards i.e that the dividend yield far exceeds the return I would get by just leaving my money on deposit.
However, when I point out that surely any return measured against inflation can only be measured against the original sum invested, in my example the original £100,000, his answer is the same as I have been reading on here.
So I posed him the question:
If you start off with £100,000, see that fall to £80,000 in year 1 and receive £5000 in dividends during that year what is your actual return against inflation?
His answer was that it would be pointless explaining the complicated investment principles that he was employing as I know nothing about investing in stocks and shares, which is true, and that the shares would eventually rocket.
When I pointed out that as a small individual investor he was merely at the mercy of the market with no control over his own investment decisions -effectively gambling and praying in equal measure- the answer was the same.
I told him that I once owned, and sold, some BT shares when they were about £7-8. When would they get back there again? His answer: no chance-in your dreams-when I’ve made a profit I’m out to invest in****, one of his other dead certs.
It is because I know nothing about horse racing that I also ignore his betting tips.

My first post here but I have been following the BT share board for a while now. I currently hold no BT Shares and have zero investment knowledge. However, I did hold BT shares about 20 years ago and worked for them for a while.
What I can’t get a grip on is the logic of buying shares for the dividend then watching them go into freefall, yet still maintaining that they are a worthwhile investment for the dividend.
For instance: say I have £100,000 to invest and am given two options- buy £100,000 worth of bank shares and get a 5% dividend or put the money on deposit with the same bank and get 1.5% interest.
If I choose the share option and the share value then drops to £80,000 then unless the share value recovers it will take me 4 years to recoup my original investment if the dividend pays out £5000 per year.
On the other hand after 4 years my original deposit is now worth £106,000.
I am keeping this simple without taking any other factors into account i.e compound interest, etc.
Therefore, am I not just standing still buying the shares, with no chance of getting out, except at a loss until such time as I recoup my original investment? Obviously if the share price recovers I can recoup my original investment sooner, but unlike having the money on deposit I am stuck with dead ‘asset’ that I can do nothing with, at the mercy of the market.
The reason I ask is because I cannot see any logic in ‘averaging down’ as some people appear to do, or convincing myself that my bad investment decision was really a wise one, just because I am apparently getting more in dividends than I would get just by leaving the money on deposit earning a lower percentage annual return.
Surely an investment that you are stuck with is just a bad investment and not worth ploughing more money into in the belief that one day all will come good?
As I say, I know nothing about investing, so perhaps someone can put me straight.

My first post here but I have been following the BT share board for a while now. I currently hold no BT Shares and have zero investment knowledge. However, I did hold BT shares about 20 years ago and worked for them for a while.
What I can’t get a grip on is the logic of buying shares for the dividend then watching them go into freefall, yet still maintaining that they are a worthwhile investment for the dividend.
For instance: say I have £100,000 to invest and am given two options- buy £100,000 worth of bank shares and get a 5% dividend or put the money on deposit with the same bank and get 1.5% interest.
If I choose the share option and the share value then drops to £80,000 then unless the share value recovers it will take me 4 years to recoup my original investment if the dividend pays out £5000 per year.
On the other hand after 4 years my original deposit is now worth £106,000.
I am keeping this simple without taking any other factors into account i.e compound interest, etc.
Therefore, am I not just standing still buying the shares, with no chance of getting out, except at a loss until such time as I recoup my original investment? Obviously if the share price recovers I can recoup my original investment sooner, but unlike having the money on deposit I am stuck with dead ‘asset’ that I can do nothing with, at the mercy of the market.
The reason I ask is because I cannot see any logic in ‘averaging down’ as some people appear to do, or convincing myself that my bad investment decision was really a wise one, just because I am apparently getting more in dividends than I would get just by leaving the money on deposit earning a lower percentage annual return.
Surely an investment that you are stuck with is just a bad investment and not worth ploughing more money into in the belief that one day all will come good?
As I say, I know nothing about investing, so perhaps someone can put me straight.