Shares go up, Shares go down…
When I worked at Barclays Bank PLC I bought shares every month from my salary – doing that saved me 20% of the purchase price. But other than this I haven’t really traded in shares before.
I have been meaning to dabble in shares for a while now and have pestered my friend Dave about it, who has become somewhat of an authority on sharedealing (him looking up the real-time share prices on his mobile phone is a familiar sight).
Just when I decided to invest in some shares and had read up on it all and finally opened up some sharedealing accounts, the credit crunch took hold and the price of shares in virtually all sectors plummetted. The media was full of speculation but in reality nobody knew how the ‘credit crunch’ was going to play out, how long it would last for, which sectors would be most effected, etc. Indeed still nobody knows.
Anyway, being the eternal optomist and having loosly keeping an eye on Barclays shares over the past 9 years I thought I’d take a plunge and buy some share in them when I thought they were at a good price. Within 2 weeks they went from over 500.00 to 167.00 – an absolute steal! So I grabbed £3,000 worth and crossed my fingers (very scientific…). For the next 4 days they went up in value – it was really exciting stuff and I could see why Dave was so ‘addicted’ to it (am I allowed to say addicted? Compulsed by it maybe…). After 4 days I was £520 up – enough for a Herman Miller Aeron chair (which I want)! Then on the 5th day – disaster the prices dropped again and I was no longer in profit. In fact they dropped at one point to 117.00. I wasn’t too worried because I had intended for the investment to be a long-term investment and I had just been sticking with my game plan.
A few weeks later they went up again and I was once again £300 up – then a day after that i was down again, but still; I’m not worried.
In fact, today they dropped to 138.00 (was 170.00 yesterday!) so I bought another £1,000 this morning at that price – but then they dropped again, to 130.00. I’m sure they will go up again and I’ll use this £1,000 investment for short-term trading.
I have also invested £1,000 in Renold at 33.00. On that I have put a target of 44 and a stop of 27 – basically I copied the Naked Trader as he seems to be doing okay for himself 
It will be interesting to see how things turn out, but I think that now is a great time (if there ever is a good time) to try out trading in shares because everything is at such a low price right now. Yes things could go horribly wrong, but I’m not going to risk too much and I don’t mind being patient and waiting for the prices to slowly come back up.