How does the sharemarket work?

Haha. I don't know at this point if I will ever trade live. I estimate it will take a minimum of 3 months of solid demo trading until I even decide if I want to pursue this further. IF I decide to pursue it further, I would demo trade for a lot longer than that before I decided if I wanted to go live. I'm not in a hurry to lose a lot of money

Also, I forgot to ask if you leverage or only use your own funds.[/QUOTE]
A mixture of both. I have a complicated money management system. You can PM with all specific questions, because I don't think that others will strongly benefit from our conversation.

 

Still, it was a valuable experience and taught me I wasn't smart, it was totally random that I made some money and totally random that I lost it again. I didn't actually have any control over the outcome.

I won't forget that as I look further into this.[/QUOTE]
That is the main reason why people are afraid of trading. They think they must be SMART to do it profitable on a consistent basis. It's not true.
People must be PATIENT and only take their share of the market and nothing else. It's hard on your psycho, but it's not rocket science.

 

Thanks. That answers my question.

 

I understand your point about being patient in this area. The situation I was referring to previously was a different area to this. I fluked a couple of profitables trades and thought I was really smart. But I wasn't. It just random. I don't think what I was doing back then is anything like this. I will let you know if there are any similarities in 3 months time

 

Always ready. The biggest disadvantage of trading is that it's a VERY solitary thing. My wife still thinks I'm weird, until she goes shopping...

 

That's fine. I'm a very solitary person. I spend hours playing computer games by myself. Lucky I'm good company

 

Wow, I don't remember if I ever played a computer game after Arcanoid went out of fashion around early 1990-s.
You'll fine though. A lot of traders have a pocker background (not me, I don't even know how to play pocker).

 

Haha. I have literally spent thousands of hours playing a lot of different computer games. Which is thousands of hours alone, staring at a computer screen. If only I had put the time into learning trading

 

How does the share market work? Who knows - but hasn't stopped me from having a go

I am far from an expert, but pay attention to the cashflow and balance sheet reports - they tell you everything you need to know about the business. Research senior management to see what their track record is like and think about the industry the business is operating in. Last, try to avoid companies that have a huge exposure to government policy (I guess similar applied to property)

 

It's not always the case. I still remember Enron and many investors that got burned reading their balance sheet reports.

 

What did the cash flow statement show? Using a Balance Sheet and Cashflow you can reconstruct where the money is going

 

Whatever happened to @barnes?