Member Info for stockpickfree

Not checked in on this board for more than a year. Maybe two?

Where’s Doug? Has he given up? A lot of people seem to have…

I see that Stephen is still keeping the faith, I can remember him telling me how I’d regret not staying in but a look at the share chart makes me very glad indeed I sold all that time ago. No doubt he’’ll tell me that it is about to go to da moon. :-)

Check out stocks in small defence companies guys! That’s where the action has been of late, and I’m not sure it’s done what with the world being so dangerous and all…

Yup.

If there is positive news w are going to see the mother of all short squeezes.

IF.

I have to say I’m impressed with how this is holding up today.

I agree with your analysis Chid but I find it very hard to understand why you would continue to hold Lloyds since as you yourself say, it is about to take a huge hit.

The only plausible explanation is that you are in fact short, but don’t want to admit that as shorts get vilified on these boards.

Nothing wrong with that, being short is the sensible side of this trade IMO, in fact it is a humungus short opportunity. I’m not keen on the lack of honesty though, if so.

Good post, I agree with you. Most of what you say anyway.

One question though. You are in Lloyds I think. If so why don’t you just sell and get back in at a lower price post the SC ruling?

I’m a bit late in adding my two penny worth.

It’s solely a question of your appetite for risk. No one knows what the Supreme Court ruling will be. If they did there wouldn’t be any potential money to be made, or risk to consider, obviously.

But the key aspect for me is that II don’t know if anyone actually knows what the percentage chance of a positive or negative ruling is. And that’s the whole point. If we knew with certainty that there was only a 10% chance of a catastrophic ruling that would be a totally different risk reward scenario from a 90% chance.

So you are faced with two options, a big loss or a big gain, yet you have no real idea how likely either outcome is. In those situations I myself prefer to sit on my hands and await events, but I quite respect others who take the opposite view.

(I’d also add that If you are already invested your perspective is skewed by optimism bias. And even if you aren’t you can be subject to normalcy bias, you need to bear that in mind too…)

But pays your money and takes your choice…

Keynes was mostly thinking of the South Sea bubble I think, Knot, although the Dutch Tulip mania you cite is another great example.

The point about the greater fool theory is that you can use it to make money. If you sold before the South Sea bubble burst you could have made an unimaginable fortune and some did. Also the fools weren’t stupid. Sir Isaac Newton, perhaps the cleverest man on the planet at the time went bankrupt in the South Sea bubble catastrophe..

Wish you could edit once you have posted!

Anyway you get my drift.

The “Greater Fool Theory” was created by the famous economist, John Maynard Keynes, I think when he was the Domestic Bursar of Kings College Cambridge, in charge of its investment strategy. Or maybe he wrote it up later.

Anyway he used to read the financial press in his dressing gown over breakfast in his room in college, and then spend half an hour making investments once the markets opened before starting his day job as an Economics Don.

He had stunning success as an investor, increasing his college’s endowment by multiple factors. Don’t knock the Greater Fool theory.

He used to read the financial

agreed stup.

there is lots of money to be made in day trading if you have the talent. it is just that most people who try it don’t!

i can’t day trade myself, but i respect those that can. in fact i respect everyone who makes money trading in whatever form because it is very hard over the long term. it wears you down. people can get lucky streaks and they think they have cracked it. that’s the moment of most danger.

i can’t count the number of times i’ve had a good run and got over confident and ****y only to fritter it away on greedy, speculative trades. pride comes before a fall…

like i always say, it is mostly psychology.

I guess my fear is that the Supreme Court comes out with a judgment that leads to potential claims in the billions.

You say here that in that case there is likely to be government and/or BOE intervention. Maybe, I have no idea.

But if it does make this ruling, the stock is going to get hammered on the day of the judgement. I mean REALLY hammered. What happened this week will be as nothing.

Obviously if it doesn’t find in that way anyone holding the stock is going to get a fantastic appreciation from here, I get that.

I just think there are safer plays. If the share price does tank I’d see this as a fantastic turnaround opportunity, which is why I am here. And if I am wrong and the share price flies from here, too bad. It wouldn’t be the first time I’d let an opportunity slip.

The big profits in trades are made over the longer time frame after a breakout, day traders give all that up.

Obviously the key is finding the opportunity and timing it well! But if the trend is big enough you don’t have to find the exact bottom and sell at the exact top. Indeed doing so is often a matter of luck.

There’s a really hilarious passage in his book when describes coming over to London over the Xmas period, just before it all got completely out of control and the whole Singapore market started betting against him. At the time senior management thought he was a superstar and they opened up the trading floor just for him, so he could trade through the night, when Singapore was open. Because he was just so brilliant the bank couldn’t let him be away from it even one day. Even he thought it was funny.

He was on his own through the night, pretending to trade, but of course not doing so because it was all a charade, but he didn’t dare give the game away so he had to go along with it.

In the morning they came in and asked how much money he had made and he found it hard to keep a straight face.

His view is that they were so stupid (all their bonuses were dependent on his so called profits and they wanted to believe despite all the evidence to the contrary) that they weren’t fit to run the bank and deserved all that happened…

Following on from what I have just written, something else occurs to me.

Have you ever read “Rogue Trader” the autobiography of the infamous guy who brought down Barings, Nick Leeson?

It is fascinating as a story in human psychology. Gripping. But from the trading point of view (the reason I originally bought it) completely pointless..

The guy couldn’t trade. He was the top guy in Barings Singapore, and he was COMPLETELY useless at it. He hadn’t got the first clue. So he invented an account to hide his losses, and added and added to it until it brought down the whole bank.

It’s an extraordinary story, and a great read. If you are interested in trading (and why are you here otherwise?) you’ll be fascinated by the technical trading as well as the human side of it.

Trouts, I agree that TA is a representation of the human psychology I was speaking of, and the herd mentality you instance. As has also been said it is a pictorial representation of all our individual greed and fear.

But you are always looking in the rear view mirror. It doesn’t predict the future.

I think a lot of new traders get caught up in the concept of TA, read all the books, buy the software, and think it is the key to success. If it were that simple everyone would be rich! I’d even argue that the best way to actually guarantee success from TA would be to write a successful book on the subject, or come up with a software package.

And if you DID stumble upon some magical TA answer to predicting the markets, assuming it did not soon become self defeating, why would you share it?

That’s why I say, whatever technique you utilise to choose your trades, the ultimate key to success is how you manage the results psychologically.

Technical analysis is great SG but the most important thing is psychology. The human being is hard wired to do exactly the reverse of what a trader should do. Because of fear we sell when we should be buying, and because of greed we buy when we should be selling. That is why only 10% or so of traders are actually seriously successful. Plus the resilience you need to cope with losses (which everyone goes through many many times) requires a particular temperament.

The best book ever written on trading is “Confessions of A Stock Operator” by Edwin Lefevre, based on the trading legend, Jesse Livermore. It’s extraordinary, there are gems on almost every page.

Interesting to see the sell off today. Something like this was always my fear (check my posting history) and kept me from trading CBG even while it was going up and up. Which was hard, by the way.

You could argue that this is a great time to get in, but I worry that this is far from the bottom. The risk of a bad SC judgment next month is too great for my taste.

But if that takes place I think this could be a great turn around play. So I’ll be watching with interest.

Got interested in this stock just before this recent nice rise and decided not to get in. Big mistake! Woulda, coulda, shoulda and all that…

So what to do now? As I say I haven’t been following it for a while, but as I recall the big Supreme Court Appeal is heard in March, right?

So my question is, what is the long case here? Is it just hope that it will find in CBG’s favour? Or is there something more concrete?

I made a mistake and missed this nice rise. But if I were in I’d be looking to cash my profits in case the SC ruling was bad, or even very bad. The stock price action suggests that hasn’t been happening, yet at least.

Can anyone tell me why? What are the grounds for positivity?

if the fca is anything like the fsa (and i hear they are) they are a bunch of idiots.

i lost just over £30k when a broker licensed by the fsa went bankrupt and they refused to refund my losses. i eventually got a full refund from the administrators, but it was eight freaking years later.

i have never dealt with such a bunch of ******s. they make the nhs and hmrc look efficient and competent.

Agreed.

This is a play on massive share price appreciation not dividend income. That is what makes it an interesting proposition.

(As an aside I have no idea why we are so obsessed with dividends in this country. The Yanks aren’t and their stock markets are far more exciting and lucrative to trade than ours. I’m not saying that is the only reason, of course, there is more liquidity and a lot more dynamism in the economy basically, and our tech sector is basically non existent. I don’t know about you but I get so bored with the deeply uninspiring companies on the FTSE, and don’t get me started on AIM) .