JammieDodger
Senior Member
- Joined
- Jun 25, 2008
- Messages
- 361
- Reaction score
- 2
Jim Cramer's advice is something that bothers me, since his word has a large impact on a large audience, its tough to say weather or not its accurate.
I think it's quite easy to say it's largely inaccurate based on his below market returns some years and at his worst a year in which it would have been better to take the opposite position on all his tips (allegedly).
He's wealthy and that means he might know what he's doing - it doesn't mean he's sharing that wisdom rather than exploiting his status for his own means.
I too tend to follow Buffett's style, or at least I follow the mantra that the best time to sell is never. Unlike Buffett I invest in tech and commodity stocks as well as small caps.
Regarding trading as an amateur. This is embarassing but I'll be honest, I lost £1.5k trading when I first started out (out of £2k I'd put in). It's incredibly easy to get emotional and read things that aren't there, especially with no practice and when trading OTC stocks. The fact that I was sure I could replicate a 100% return I'd gotten in a day also didn't help. The only thing that stopped me was the realisation that even if I did make gross gains, because of the lack of money left the commissions would stop them from being net gains.
People do make money trading based on technicals, I've known people who make a living of it working from home. It's not for most people though and certainly not for me. All I got from my experience was knowledge of how to read a chart and pick entry points, paper trading could have done that for free.