marco, read what AcidRaZor says!
Having made quite a bit on the JSE by fluke and lost quite a bit on the JSE by stupidity, herewith some of rwenzori's tips for stock exchange idiots:
1. If you hand money over to a broker and let him trade on your behalf, you are likely to lose out unless he backs a real winner. A broker earns on the churn - his fees are a % of trades. He therefore is highly motivated to trade your hard-earned $$$ frequently rather than leaving them in some nice quiet blue-chip stock. To put it plainly - his motivation is HIS enrichment, not so much YOURS.
2. The one alternative is to make the trade decisions yourself. Unless you have some clue, in fact waaaaay more than a clue, you are only going to make money by fluke. OK, you overhear some hot tip while in the toilet one day, and do a big buy, then? Normally the share bumbles around what you paid for it ( unless we are in a panic as now LOL! ). Why? Studies have shown that stock prices anticipate publicly announced results by 2-3 months. So your toilet tip is probably too late. You might call it insider trading, you might call it fraud, but the guy whose cousin is the financial director of Acme Widgets knows loooong in advance of the rest of us what those Acme shares are going to do come year-end.
3. So you go off and look in the papers at the "Best Performing Unit Trusts" and sink whatever you have left into those. What they don't tell you is that those wonderful growth percentages are BEFORE they have taken their cut, and their fees, and a few "adjustments", and you might as well have taken a Govt bond.
So really the stock market is only for those that know what they are doing. Which excludes me, and you too, by the sounds of it.
( It also seems to exclude Vox Telecom who sunk over R30m into a street lottery called Dealstream LOL ).
