I don't know whether when talk of shares has come up before, I mentioned my dabbling back at college.

Back in 2004 or so I had £300 of birthday money I decided to invest. I saw a company called As Seen on Screen, and thought it was a movie memorabilia company. They were like 4p a share so I opted to get a load of them, thinking they were so low it could only go up.

http://uk.finance.yahoo.com/echarts?s=ASC.L#symbol=asc.l;range=my;compare=;indicator=volume;charttype=area;crosshair=on;ohlcvalues=0;logscale=off;source=undefined;

6 months later I sold them for £600. I kept £300 and reinvested the other £300, which didn't do too well.

Every now and again I check to see how ASOS are doing. if I'd have kept the shares for another 6-12 months I'd have made a few thousand pounds from my £300 investment.

I just checked again, and unless my maths is wonky, I'd have made £112500 from that £300.

Ouch

Blimey. Never look back.

ASOS did indeed go from strength to strength and are huge now but you still doubled your money back in 2004, and would you have kept the shares for 8 years?

All if buts and maybes, as per above, don't look back, easier said than done I know!

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.

Ouch

I used to mess about with a barclays stock brokers account, was expensive, monthly fees and transaction fees.

I still have 86 suspended northen rock shares from my efforts.. lol

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!

That's a real wounder, but hindsight and all that... you know there's no such thing as a sure thing in stocks, it couldn't have gone either way.

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'm sure there have been several threads on shares on tek before, but they always stumbled with where was the best place to buy online, so zypder I amongst others I'm sure are interested to hear your findings if indeed you had any luck

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.

take a look at cyan
potentially could go through the roof (was trading 50p+ 3years ago)
they develop smart metering - my cousin writes the source code.

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

Quote from: Eggtastico on May 22, 2012, 20:15:28 PM
take a look at cyan
potentially could go through the roof (was trading 50p+ 3years ago)
they develop smart metering - my cousin writes the source code.

I very nearly bought into them this morning. Regretting not now, as they've kept on climbing today whilst expansys dropped a tad ><

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...

Quote from: zpyder on May 22, 2012, 22:20:39 PM

Quote from: Eggtastico on May 22, 2012, 20:15:28 PM
take a look at cyan
potentially could go through the roof (was trading 50p+ 3years ago)
they develop smart metering - my cousin writes the source code.

I very nearly bought into them this morning. Regretting not now, as they've kept on climbing today whilst expansys dropped a tad ><

well they are about to break the chinese market - all their street lights are going to smart metering. If they get selected, they are going to sky rocket.
Also got irons in India & Brazil