Blimey. Never look back.

Indeed.  I just find it so annoying as it was even a mistake, I didn't research them at all before buying, whilst the ones I did research never made anything, and lost money instead!

It's making me want to dabble again. I know some people here do, I'm curious what brokers you use? I used to use ComDirect, which became SquareTrade or something. When I started it was free but £12.50 per transaction, and I closed my account when they wanted to make an account subscription.

Ideally I'm looking for a nice online interface with cheap fees as I'll only be working with small amounts of money.

http://www.moneysupermarket.com/shares/

Useful

Looks like there are some companies that it's £5-10 a trade, one seems too good to be true at £6 a trade, will have to research it tonight!

This'll make you feel better:

Ron Wayne sold back his 10% of Apple after 12 days with the company, recouping $800. Those shares are now worth an estimated $35 billion

http://blogs.villagevoice.com/runninscared/2011/10/ron_wayne_apple.php

 

I tried registering last night with Traders Own. First registration failed and the error message was a white screen with a line of text. I re-registered but for a basic trading account (as opposed to a shares and savings isa trading account) and that worked.

However after a quick look around their website it looked just how it has been described by some review sites, a trading platform for the twitter/facebook generation. It's all centred around social networking. In a way this could work with people sharings tips and the likes, but I just felt that it was open to a lot of abuse potentially for false information etc.

The site was more confusing than needed for trying to find latest stock info too.

Plus the security was laughable, email+ 6 digit numeric pin, so it wouldn't take much for someone to get to your account through number crunching.

On the plus side it's £6 a trade, so 2nd cheapest out there.

I opted for Halifax which is £11.95 a trade but no account fees. Reasons being security, the fact it's actually a bank, and once I'd registered , the information presented is quite powerful. When I had SelfTrade either the options were very basic, or stock dealing has come a long way.

I ended up spending several hours last night looking at stocks. Lots of options, heat maps to show growth/shrink industries, and a filter that frankly has way too many options for me, I just wanted to see the cheapest stocks out there.

I ended up buying 14400 shares in expansys this morning. They're only a ~2p at the moment, I doubt they'll go up by much but if they bump to 2.5p I'll net £50 or something. I'm not entirely convinced it'll work out but worth a punt. I was hoping to find something that would be likely to profit from the olympics this year. Dixons shares are "cheap" and I pondered whether they'd make money on HD TV sales etc. Expansys has recently broken into the Asian markets according to news sources, so who knows.

One thing I don't like is that the halifax site lists stockbroker tips (EG, buy, sell, neutral etc). But when you actually look at these in detail some tips are dated back to 2009/2010 so way out of date. Others are more recent, but still, very dodgy to follow.

I currently hold just over 5k shares in Logica.

Bought at 54p each, the current guide price by brokers is sitting at 100p.

Sitting at around 68p now. A month or so ago it was at 130+p

Fingers crossed it climbs again and I'm actually around to cash in when it happens.

Sent from my GT-I9000 using Tapatalk 2

I ended up selling my Expansys shares and buying into Cyan. I pretty much instantly regretted my expansys shares. So now basically from my £300 I'm down £50 due to 3x £11.95 fees and a slight drop in expansys. To recoup my money and make £10 Cyan just needs to climb .25p, which if it doesn't drop in the next few days, should be possible...