I would like some opinions on how to best take advantage of a regular price fluctuation I have noticed concerning a share in the London ftse. The price changes by around a pound every few months and has been doing so for many years. I want to buy a couple of hundred of them and then sell them once they hit their lower price. Now which is the cheapest service provider which will allow me to buy and sell either online or face to face? I am not too bothered about instant transactions if it costs a whole heap more but I don't want to have to pay a regular fee to maintain the service as I'm not thinking of taking it up professionally. I have checked out a small number of online companies but they seem to want to be charging around £20 at a time and this would easily eat into any gains made. So any suggestions?
Ideas on small scale share buying & selling
Jun 25, 2005
21 Replies
How about selling them when they hit their 'higher' price in stead?
So instead of offering any advice, you simply point out a mistake! Nice one.
To the OP, you may have to try putting up more money, so that your profit will be bigger and then the trading cost will br a much smaller bite. I think that you should be able to get trading done for arounf £10 to £12 if you look around.
Mike
Have a look at - Alliance Trust Savings Halifax Sharedealer
Check the spread doesn't eat up any gains via ADVFN
I use
formatting link
You can set stop losses and set a get out when the price hits its your top price. You can also set trades in advance to either buy or sell the share so you can profit from both the share going up and coming down. There are no costs involved and no CGT, you can also trade on a margin so your capital can be gaining interest in the bank, however this is calculated into the spread.
Which share are you thinking of trading?
"Jane Tweedynn" wrote
Why no CGT?
Don't know and as we know tax rules often change when everyone else jumps in so expect it to change.
formatting link
Presumably there is no CGT *only if* the trading is sufficiently "small scale" that gains will not exceed the relevant threshold. Just make sure you don't sell the BTL investment in the same tax year...
Nope. Under current UK legislation, all profits made via financial spread betting are free of CGT.
Presumably because it's classed as betting. There is no tax on gambling wins.
In message , Andy Pandy writes
"Andy Pandy" wrote
Jane said "buy or sell the share" - *not* buy/sell a derivative, or place a bet ...
Check the link she posted. It looks like betting to me, but I only had a quick look...
It depends on your interpretation of gambling. I think that owning shares in a company is a form of gambling.
In the method I have recommended it is much like futures trading without actually place the "put" or "call".
Rob reckoned that he can make money on a share in the ftse as it moves between two prices every few months. I recommended that instead of tying up capital and incurring costs to spread bet the share price. Its not like owning real shares as you get no dividends, no voting rights and the future does expire. Some highly traded shares can expire daily and automatically rollover to the next day.
"Jane Tweedynn" wrote
Eh? No it doesn't - if anything, it depends on your interpretation of "either buy or sell the share" (which is what you wrote). You didn't mention gambling (and neither did I).
"Jane Tweedynn" wrote
So you think CGT doesn't apply to that either? ;-)
"Jane Tweedynn" wrote
No, you said "either buy or sell the share". It's not the same!
Yes Thomas got me on my mistake but maybe I should return the favour and point out that it is 'instead' (a bit dangerous correcting spelling/grammer mistakes in usenet but.........) I wish I could follow your advice Mike but I simply don't have enough spare cash to buy much more than 200 as the shares I am looking at are HBOS shares which means I would have to fork out about 1.5K . I have not bothered looking at any charts but if you check you will see that the price bounces about around the £6.5 - £7.0 mark all the way up to it's current level of mid £8. It did go as low as £4.5 for a while but that was only on one occasion so if I could find somewhere that offers trading for a tenner than buying and selling will only cost £20 and bring in a profit of maybe
200 x £1.50 every year or so. Not a lot but very welcome if I manage to pull it off.
The problem is that previous performance is not necessarily a guide to the future as they say. Banking shares could be in for a rough ride if consumer debt goes bad and house prices crash.
I did something similar in the mid- eighties. I found a share that had done badly for years. Twice a year, in the run up to results, it would rise around twenty per cent on the hopes that it was past the worst. Each time the results would be disappointing and it would go back down again. This had happened for several years. I managed to pull it off twice before people realised it was not going to recover and its long-term decline continued.
There were also several years in a row where retail shares went up substantially in the run up to Christmas, and then fell back as the results came in to show Christmas hadn't been as good as the pundits expected. I made some money one year on that, but shortly afterwards that run was broken too.
James
Its trading talk.
"Jane Tweedynn" wrote
Exactly! - "trading" in *shares*. You don't "trade" in bets - which is what you meant to be talking about.
You can buy and sell shares at
formatting link
for £10 a go. You have to pay stamp duty on buys. You can't predict the future based on the past. You might want to check out some of the literature on the Efficient Market before blowing too much cash on some smart investment idea, somethink like `A Random Walk Down Wall Street` by Burton Malkiel.
Join the Discussion
Have something to add? Share your thoughts — no account required.
Didn't find your answer?
Ask the community — no account required