Member Info for olliebear

barron I've sent you a PM, I'm not sure whether you can reply to it or not, let me know if you don't mind.

barron, do you have an email address? I'd like to contact you regarding a business opportunity if possible.

Hey Barron long time no see! What have you done to the SP, lol??

It can't be a coincidence that this merger news is released just days before Sainsbury's year end figures. Maybe they're expecting bad news?

Sainsbury's SP has risen 20% in a month - this could double that. There's an opportunity here!

JJ, IG have a demo account on the CFD platform. It is priceless, and if you are considering using CFD, you must trial and error using the demo. It gives you 10 million in fake money as well. It will show you how much commissions are, and it will also show you the eye watering swings in profit and loss. American stocks are particularly attractive because of the very low commissions charged. The minimum charge is $15 per end. One thing I would add is to stay away from shorting. If the stocks go the other way, your liability becomes unlimited, because there is no theoretical limit to how high a stock can rise. Longing is just zero, you lose your stake and that's it. There's a story on the internet about an American fella who ended up with a bill for $300k when his short went disastrously wrong overnight!! Overall, though, CFD is very risky indeed, it can become addictive, especially when you pick up a couple of early good results. My advice is to try the demo for at least a month. It's your own attitude to risk and reward that counts more than anything.

Filmster, I use IG. It's the same there as well. If you leave positions open on the CFD platform you get charged interest. It's not a huge amount, but it could add up over a week or two. Not sure exactly about forex stuff, which I don't touch to be honest, but standard buy or sell stocks do attract overnight interest. I've only ever used IG, and apart from recently, I've never had any problems with them. They're cheap too, standard share platform commission for me is just �5.00 per trade.

JJ, I cashed out very early @1515. It's currently running around 1600, so instead of 6.5k I could have made about 25 grand. Netflix is the one stock that gives me sleepless nights, though. An 80% increase since December at one point. I don't know why I didn't pull the trigger then. The thing with American stocks on the CFD platform (the highly lucrative and highly risky platform that I advise everyone to keep clear of) is that there's a very low commission rate with them. The Amazon stocks cost just �20 for both ends. Compare that to UK stocks, a minimum of 0.5% per end. I did a huge deal with RBS a while back, made about 6k, but the commissions were a whopping �600 per end. Same with Tesco. Still, there's a lot more to be made than with the standard share dealing platform - and a lot more to lose very quickly too. And I have lost big in the past.

Looks like it's stabilised nicely in the high 230s. Good platform for the coming year. I'll be dipping in again in the run up to the next quarter. Meanwhile, I've just made a killing on Amazon shares. 6.5k. ::)))))))))

I'm not sure. There are plenty of exchanges, like Coinbase, but I've resisted the temptation to buy. They're just too volatile. WinCoin has crashed from the dizzy heights of 9 cents all the way down to $0.000000052. I'm not sure how such a thing could ever be traded, because as you suggest, where would the buyers come from? I reckon you could double your money in a week or lose the lot on any one of those currencies.

Guys, I don't know whether you take any interest in crypto, but I had to laugh at this coin - WinToken. Get this - in the last week, it's risen by.....wait for it......93 MILLION per cent. At one stage, before falling back, it was over 250 million per cent. Take a look at this - https://coinranking.com/coin/wintoken-win The world's gone utterly bonkers.

The one stock I sorely regret not taking a punt on was Netflix. It was in the low 180s in December. It's now pushing 330p. As for Tesco, I do believe it will get back to 300 this year, and I may well buy in again before the next quarter. The point I was trying to make is that these things are unpredictable, as Next proved.

Since when does the stock market behave in a logical manner? Recently, Next had their worst figures for 25 years, yet the SP rose by 10%. Share price movements do not behave in a linear fashion and never have! It's those nuisance unknown events that make fools of us all, including me.

Unilever and Rio Tinto Q1 results out next week.

Another IPO went live today JJ - Zuora Inc, another tech company. IPO of $14 per share, opened around $19.60 - an instant gain of over 40%. Nice for employees and the owners. It's called an IPO, yet the general public do not have access to the initial price. Still, it went to a high of $21.23, so a still considerable 10% increase from the stock exchange launch. Problem is, there's no way of knowing when the price goes live on the exchange, so it's literally a case of sitting in front of your screen and waiting. Of course, there's also no way of knowing if the price will go up at all, so if you pull the trigger the moment it opens....well, you know how it works. If you're a short term trader like me, then it's definitely worth looking at future technology IPOs.

Well, it took 3 hours to appear on the market after the initial launch, and the expected spike never really materialised. Of course, the price set by the NYSE of $130 odd dollars per share was not available to the general public, so when it did open, it was $160 dollars, and barely got over that price. Nothing doing for me, unfortunately. Remember it was a direct lsiting, and not a standard IPO listing, so no new shares were created and it wasn't underwritten by financial institutions. Indeed, it crashed won to $135 at one stage - barely above the price set by the NYSE. The one IPO I missed, regretfully, was Dropbox, which was a standard IPO listing, and surged 15% the second it was listed. The next big one is Docusign, but the date's not been finalsied yet. Take a look at this - https://www.nyse.com/ipo-center/filings The technology IPOs seem to outperform all of the other sectors.

Don't beat yourself up. Nobody knows how a stock is going to perform - at best it's an educated guess. Nobody could have predicted �2.30! I've been here many times before and the price has gone into reverse, even after good figures. There is simply no way of knowing. A profit is a profit, and there will be plenty more opportunities.

Got to be honest, didn't see �2.25, didn't even see �2.20, though I thought that was an outside bet. Now here's a thought for those of you familiar with CFD trading. 30k at �2.02 and selling at 2.20 would have made me 36k. �2.25 46k. **Gulp**. Even @2.16, which I went at this morning, would have fetched 28k. Here's what you could have won..... A word of caution to anyone considering using CFD trading. Don't. It's seriously addictive and seriously dangerous. It's like a slow motion roulette table.

Highest price since July 2015, but there's still a very long way to go to get back to �3.00. That's the way it should work though, right? If a company screws up - and Tesco did royally - then they get severely punished - and they did. When they get it right - and they have - then they get rewarded. The market works!!

Ah for that crystal ball, AL75. I wish all these things moved in a straight line....but they seldom do. I've leaned the hard way to take the money when it's there, and nobody buys at the bottom and sells at the top. If they do, it's pure luck. I'll see where the price is before the next quarter to see if there's any value. In the meantime, there are plenty of other opportunities!