Two new positions opened today: BG Group stake doubled to 711 shares with an average buy price of 1380p over two batches. Centrica PLC at 299.48p for 1657 shares.

I expect to hold BG Group (BG.) until it reaches at least 1471p per share and Centrica (CNA) until it hits 330p per share. In the case of Centrica, I’m not too fussed how long that takes (within reason).

So after more than a year of silence, in mid October, Apple finally released its next generation iPhone, the rather depressing iPhone 4S. Continue reading “Investment Mistakes: How To Lose £2500” »

September, particularly the last couple of weeks, have been a rough time for traders. The Eurozone crisis (it’s Greece’s fault) has caused the entire market to under perform, resulting in a rather dampened set of circumstances in which the NASDAQ and the FTSE have pretty much just fallen consistently for nine days on the trot.

Almost every penny of profit I made during late August and early September was reclaimed by the market.

But to reframe that with an upside, I was fortunate to begin my trading career with such large winnings. Maybe that money is not still in my bank, but it has allowed me to learn some very valuable lessons for close to a net cost of zero. In fact, there’s a chance I still made a few pounds out of it.

What follows are ten lessons I learned from this experience; the education I bought: Continue reading “10 Stock Trading Lessons Learned The Hard Way” »

If you either use, or are thinking of using Halifax Share Dealing to trade shares on the stock market, please heed this warning and think again. Their website has recently become very glitchy, especially when dealing with US stocks, and is making errors worth thousands of pounds with YOUR money.

These are mistakes, which, ultimately, you, like me, may end up paying for.

Take a look at this real life example from August 23rd 2011.

Anybody who has ever used this service will know that when you trade a US stock, this is the screen you see just before you put the order through:

Literally 30 seconds later, the contract note that appears in my account to document the transaction is VASTLY different to the screen I was just shown with “indicative” information:

And now suddenly the exchange rate has DRAMATICALLY changed. The share price has dramatically changed and the amount payable has also dramatically reduced.

When I rang Halifax up about this, I felt I could have had the same quality of conversation if I had substituted the person on the other end of the phone with a brick wall.

All the Halifax intern could say was that the price shown pre-sale is “estimated” and “indicative”  of the price you will get for the sale.

Indicative? In what world is £15000 indicative of £9000, when the traded amount was only around £10 000?

I would have thought indicative in most peoples’ book would have allowed for a couple of percent either side. Apparently in Halifax’s book, a 33% deviation still falls under this definition.

A 30% difference between indicative and actual is not indicative as much as simply inaccurate. But Halifax would not hear it. Despite their website – a bank website – quite obviously screwing up on their maths (in and of itself, pretty disgusting), they refuse to admit any fault and insist that a £15 000 estimate amount for a £9869 actual payment still falls under their definition of indicative.

By the same logic, an actual payment of £20 000 would have been just as indicative to them.

Because of this incident and Halifax’s refusal to be reasonable about it, I have cut all ties with Lloyds Banking Group.

I would also urge others NOT to use a Halifax Share Dealing account. They are crooks.

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Out of interest, I cannot be the first Halifax customer to fall victim to this sort of mistake. If you have suffered similar damage as a result of Halifax’s incompetent website, why not post your story below: