A story of a home-based trader – Vimal Mehta
Commercial pilot Vimal Mehta often has hours to kill in hotel rooms during stopovers between flights. But he deliberately chooses not to spend this time trading. The 36-year old says that while this may seem like the ideal opportunity to work the market he finds that the situation puts too much pressure on him to…
Hedging your losses, and making profits, using CFDs
Not everyone lost money in the past couple of weeks of market gyrations. Plenty made tidy profits short-selling CFDs on stocks or indices they guessed would be sold down as the market over-reacted to the bad news on sub-prime mortgages. Others used CFDs to protect the value of their existing share or CFD holdings. Harley…
Trading CFDs full-time
Full-time traders used to be slick young traders on too much coffee who traded big sums for the big banks. Today, full-time traders come from all walks of life such as Newcastle-based mother of two, Justine Pollard, who trades Contracts for Difference (CFDs) from home. CFDs are criticised by many commentators as being too risky…
PEG ratio gaining in popularity against the P/E, but beware of its flaws
A common method used to establish the best value for money when comparing shares in different companies is to look at their respective price earnings ratios. This ratio is defined as the current market value of a share in cents divided by its earnings per share for a year in cents. Other things being equal,…
What is the price/earnings ratio of the overall market?
By Nick Renton AM Share investors are no doubt familiar with the concept of the price/earnings ratio for an individual stock. This ratio is defined as the market price of a share expressed in cents divided by the earnings per share also expressed in cents. The ratio can be described as the number of years’…
Investing for your child’s future
Future generations are going to need all the financial assistance they can get as government financial support for education, home ownership and retirement looks set to become just a bitter sweet memory. We sought advice from financial planners concerning the Dos and Don’ts of when, how and why to invest for children. Why consider children’s…
Think you don’t need financial advice? Think again.
If you’re a DIY investor who researches thoroughly and has translated that into a well-managed and high performing portfolio, you may think you don’t need a financial advisor. If so it may pay you to think again… and read on. You might find that you don’t know as much as you thought you did. Dominic…
The perils of sudden wealth
Two lottery wins in two consecutive years and the combined total of $5.4 million gone in just over two decades. Evelyn Adams, who achieved the Great American Dream twice when she won the New Jersey lottery in 1985 and 1986, is now destitute and living in a trailer. The tragedy is that hers is not…
Is your share portfolio a dud?
It takes a while for investors to cotton onto the fact that investment booms are happening every day – somewhere around the world. By the time the last property boom had run out of puff in Australia, the commodities bull was well into the swing of things and canny investors had already smelt out profits…
Does the strategy to buy and hold really work?
One of the most straightforward sharemarket investment strategies is ‘buy-and-hold’ investing, where you simply buy a portfolio of stocks and hold them for the long term. If you stay in the market long enough, the theory goes, you minimise the risk that your portfolio may lose its value and you allow compounding to get to…
