Stock market dealing

[Justin Passing]

I've been using Trading 212, It has always been poor in many areas, but it's getting worse. I haven't used them much for ages now. I'm investigating others. All have their snags.
Don't use it.
It's Free, except where it's really expensive. Yes you can make a lot of money when things are easy. For beginners, they'll do - you learn some lessons.
Their charts are bogus, They seem to have tweaked them to be more against you. Their staff are awful. They lie.
For ETF trades/investments they're ok but you need OEIC funds.

I thought the one I thought I'd settle on would be IG, but no. Silly charges, and you can't even add a stop to an open position.
Looks like it'll be Interactive Brokers. Pepperstone look OK too, just not as wide a range.

Too many reasons to go through! Watch out for slippage, lack of order types, lack of range of funds, excessive swap rates and FX rates.

I REALLY don't like eToro. Horrible thing. But they do have copy trading, so you could let someone else trade it. I've tried a couple and they were no good, but...
I opened an account with them for entertainment when my wife died last October. When something is "ripping" up or down, I poke the phone and go all-in at 5x or whatever their max leverage is. Add a trailing SL and a TP. It's at 7k, 9 months later.


Lazy day today. The far East recovered last night, so I opened on Micron about 9 this morning, with 20k.
7% up, x5 = 35%, on 20k = 7

 

[morqthana]

Short notice, I'm afraid, but this might be of interest to some of you.

Hybrid Event: What Does a Quant Actually Do?

The Computational Foundations of Quant Trading and Risk Management

www.eventbrite.co.uk

Free, and there's a webinar option, you don't have to rock up to the BCS venue.

 

[Justin Passing]

@motorbiking said he'd had trouble with Interactive Investor.
I'm seething . They've got about 5 things wrong in a row. Including LOSING a couple of transfers for quite a while.
I asked what went wrong. "Don't know, there must have been a delay" . No Schit Sherlock.

Looking for an alternative. The thing is they're cheap - and yes I know the saying...

 

[motorbiking]

I don’t think they are cheap at 15 quid month.

I like E.*trade but they don’t allow non US anymore

 

[Justin Passing]

I don’t think they are cheap at 15 quid month.

I like E.*trade but they don’t allow non US anymore

I don't think e-Trade is available to UK citizens now.
Trading212 doesn't have OEICS, or all the ETFs. I'm getting very p'd off with T212. Their charts are fraudulent.
Freetrade doesn't have many instruments.
AJBell isn't bad but there is a flat 0,25% charge, no USD account and they're skimpy on limit orders
HL are higher fees again.

I have a SIPP + ISA + GIA at ii so it's 25/month. It would actually be worth paying for their £40 month tier because it saves on other charges.
IB looks good for trading so I'll probably go there.
You need a spreadsheet to calculate the fees though, Saying that, they are low.
IG have silly FX rates
CMC markets have unleveraged Spread betting free of the interest fee so I'll have a look at that for long term investments tax free.
I keep lookling at Pepperstone too - they look good. Can't remember the snag.


Investing -wise, the main part of the market is hard work -I'm dipping into buckets and spades of the AI buildout but even that's too volatile. Things like UK and Euro midcaps, value stocks, dividend stocks, are have risen about 5% in the last 3 months, which beats the S&P 500.
Tech has dumped 20 odd percent and could repeat any time. When things swing t profit I'm pulling all out of most of anything US.
I don't need any more money, anything approaching that 20%pa is fine.
If I do, I can wait for an appropriate day when things are moving. Shorting Spacex has won a lot.

Using swings and up-channels has been working too. They're indicating US Housing could climb. Gold is getting popular too.

 

[morqthana]

I don't think e-Trade is available to UK citizens now.
Trading212 doesn't have OEICS, or all the ETFs. I'm getting very p'd off with T212. Their charts are fraudulent.
Freetrade doesn't have many instruments.
AJBell isn't bad but there is a flat 0,25% charge, no USD account and they're skimpy on limit orders
HL are higher fees again.

I have a SIPP + ISA + GIA at ii so it's 25/month. It would actually be worth paying for their £40 month tier because it saves on other charges.
IB looks good for trading so I'll probably go there.
You need a spreadsheet to calculate the fees though, Saying that, they are low.
IG have silly FX rates
CMC markets have unleveraged Spread betting free of the interest fee so I'll have a look at that for long term investments tax free.
I keep lookling at Pepperstone too - they look good. Can't remember the snag.


Investing -wise, the main part of the market is hard work -I'm dipping into buckets and spades of the AI buildout but even that's too volatile. Things like UK and Euro midcaps, value stocks, dividend stocks, are have risen about 5% in the last 3 months, which beats the S&P 500.
Tech has dumped 20 odd percent and could repeat any time. When things swing t profit I'm pulling all out of most of anything US.
I don't need any more money, anything approaching that 20%pa is fine.
If I do, I can wait for an appropriate day when things are moving. Shorting Spacex has won a lot.

Using swings and up-channels has been working too. They're indicating US Housing could climb. Gold is getting popular too.

But the question is who should I look to for low-cost sales of certificated and CSN shares?

 

[morqthana]

CMC markets have unleveraged Spread betting free of the interest fee so I'll have a look at that for long term investments tax free.

I used to work in sales for an IT company who always said they would have nothing to do with gambling.

CMC Markets was one of my customers.

Observing that what they did was spread betting didn't go down too well.

I'm dipping into buckets and spades of the AI buildout but even that's too volatile.

An interesting view on AI:

The US government will never be relaxed about the private sector having control over [AI]. But Donald Trump regulates by monarchical patronage, not law. He demands that companies submit to his personal authority and uses state power to punish those that resist.

There is growing clamour for less capricious regulation from within the tech sector. Engineers, and even their vainglorious bosses, are getting freaked out by the capabilities they are handling and worry about unchecked proliferation. The standard historical analogy is nuclear fission, which could be harnessed benignly, for civil power, or deployed aggressively in warheads. Except this time there are multiple Manhattan Projects all frantically competing for market share, fuelled by trillions of dollars of debt – a huge wager on future profitability – with the rest of the US economy as collateral.

Another difference: the barriers to entry for AI use, whether in research, commerce or crime, are a lot lower than for nuclear power. US labs currently have the best products, but Chinese versions are not far behind. Even if the US stays at the cutting edge, second-tier models might do enough of what customers want that Silicon Valley’s output comes to look more like a luxury niche than unassailable market dominance.
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Beijing, accepting that it can’t build the best, has prioritised mass deployment of AI that is good enough, embedding it in schools, hospitals, factories and security forces. The American economy is great for marshalling exorbitant amounts of capital into speculative innovation. China’s one-party authoritarian state is well suited for making a cheaper version and rolling it out for data harvesting and surveillance across society in ways that would struggle to gain public consent in a democracy.

The US is still the leader in AI. But that leadership might not be the perpetual money-spinning machine that the superintelligence gurus have advertised, in which case an uncomfortable correction is coming to a US economy kept buoyant by aerated tech stocks.

The comment about second-tier products being good enough reminded me of one of the ways that Microsoft rose to become, at the time, the most valuable company in the world. Identify a market segment, buy the #2 or #3 in that market, and drive #1 or #1 & #2, out of business by giving the not-as-good-but-good-enough product away for free,