If you haven’t already heard of SOPA and you don’t know what it is, it stands for “Stop Online Piracy Act” and it is a law that certain politicians are trying to get passed in the US to allegedly prevent copyright infringement online.

That doesn’t sound too bad, does it? In fact, as a film-maker and multimedia content producer, this sounds like good news. And it would be if the law wasn’t what Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg has called “a poorly thought out law” which has the potential to destroy the free and open Internet that we all know and love. And on top of that, it is unlikely that it would even achieve the objective it is aimed at achieving.

If you’re wondering why, Mashable has written a far better explanation of why SOPA is dangerous than I ever could. I recommend you read it.

Like Wikipedia, Facebook, Google, WordPress and countless other massive online properties, I am against SOPA. And yet I do believe that downloading movies and music for free is a crime that should be punishable somehow. If there was a law that would prevent that and only that, I would be in favour of it. But a law that pretty much gives the US government the power to block any site they deem to be infringing copyright either knowingly or unknowingly basically boils down to a law which allows one thing: censorship.

I am against SOPA because there are better, smarter, fairer ways to achieve what SOPA claims to want to achieve. The “Nuke The Web” approach that SOPA takes is destructive to the Internet and everything that the internet supports – free speech and innovation to name but a couple of things.

Yes, the problem of copyright infringement online does need to be solved for the sake of the future of the music and film industries, particularly the smaller record labels and independent film producers. But this is definitely NOT the way to do it.

Does The Entertainment Industry Have A Point?

Well, yes. I have long been a campaigner against deliberate digital copyright theft. Before I get misquoted let me qualify that. As a film-maker I do think that it is wrong for people to go to their favourite torrent site and be able to download movies that in some cases aren’t even in cinemas yet.

This type of behaviour has gone unpoliced and unchecked for too long. Ten years ago it was a problem. But at that time it was mainly something that the geek elite did and students who were savvy enough with the fast evolving technological world to know about things like this. But now it’s ten years later and those students are now the young adults in their late twenties and early thirties who are still doing it. And of course the students of today are doing it too. So the number of people illegally downloading music and movies is growing.

The thought process that makes people think of downloading a movie before they think of buying a cinema ticket has got to go. But how exactly to get rid of it is still a highly controversial issue.

Should Google be forced to block sites that are clearly designed for this purpose? In a way, I think they should. From personal experience running one of the UK’s magic shops which deals primarily in a particular type of intellectual property, I can’t tell you how frustrating it is when Google considers a bit torrent search engine’s illegal download page for a DVD Rip of one of my products more relevant to the search term than many of ten or fifteen online stores legitimately selling the product.

Example:

This is page one of Google for the term “13 Steps To Mentalism”, a land mark publication in magic. It’s a 6 DVD box set which teaches how to create the illusion of mind reading. But that’s beside the point. The point is that thepiratebay.org’s download page for this search term is ranked third. How are legitimate businesses every going to sell any product when Google is presenting searchers with results like this?

What We Need Instead Of SOPA

SOPA is only the latest act to try and tackle the problems that the entertainment industry is facing as a result of the ease with which intellectual property can now be shared and mass distributed between millions of people. A couple of years ago there was the Net Neutrality Act which proposed to treat different types of data differently in order to prevent sites from loading which hosted controversial or illegal content. But, it was seen as the first step on a ladder that eventually would lead to the end of the free and open Internet. And rightly so.

It’s only a question of time before politicians eventually reach a status quo with the online world and an act which addresses the issues and comfortably combats those issues and only those issues needs to be reached.

First, I think the act that is eventually passed, needs to be written by a person or group of people who understand the Internet. SOPA, if you care to read it, has clearly not been written by anybody who is familiar with the online world or digital culture. This is perhaps most prominently evidenced by it’s proposal to make site owners liable for anything that is hosted on their sites, even in the world of Web 2.0 where up to 90% of some websites’ content is contributed by its’ user base.

Second, I think we need a new definition of copyright infringement that is suitable for the online world.

Pictures and videos are shared every day as a form of self expression, and it’s high time the entertainment industry came to realize that. Music is  a part of our culture. Current copyright laws make it ridiculously easy to find yourself in breach of them and I think this needs to be thought out better.

While, yes, I would say that websites designed specifically for the deliberate mass distribution of copyrighted material like The Pirate Bay should face some sort of legal action, other websites, like personal blogs that happen to feature a clip recorded from TV the previous night cannot be charged with copyright violation. It is madness.

If these laws are passed, it could mean the end of Facebook, Youtube & Wikipedia to name just a few – all the websites that we know and love. And that’s where the lasting damage of this bill we be – preventing us from posting content on YouTube and Facebook. Not preventing online piracy. We’ll virtually have to hire a lawyer before we can send a Tweet, which will essentially devolve the internet from being the powerful knowledge sharing tool that it is today into a consumption-only entity, much like a library.

The Last Word

The Internet is a beautiful thing. And the Internet as we know it is under threat. While I do think it is important that we find some way of preventing deliberate intellectual property theft and mass distribution of copyrighted material such as sites like ThePirateBay.org, under no circumstances should this affect the fundamental nature of the Internet.

1. After A Few Days, You Forget About It

If you’re trying to make lasting and solid changes to your life, you need to stay conscious of the desired changes for as long as it takes for you to get into the new habit that you’re trying to create. On average it takes between 18 and 30 days (depending on the research you read) to form a new habit pattern so it’s fair to say that if you can make it to the end of January without failing, you have a much greater chance of success.

The Fix: Write your resolution(s) down and stick the list somewhere that you will see it every day. If necessary, create multiple copies of the list. Put aside five minutes before you go to bed every night to review the list and keep yourself mentally on track. If you can get through January without quitting or forgetting, you’ll probably make it.

2. The Goal Is Ill Defined

Other than forgetting about the intended goal, there are two other major reasons why the majority of people fail. One of them is not defining the goal(s) well enough. If a goal is to be achieved, you need some way to measure your achievement. A very common example after the over-indulgences of December is “lose weight”

But “lose weight” as a goal is far too ill defined for anybody to know whether they accomplished it or not. How much weight? And by when? A goal without a deadline is just a wish.

Additionally, you have a far greater chance of success if you write down what you are actually going to do in order to lose the weight. If you will diet, what will be the details of the diet and if you will exercise, how and when and for how long?

Somebody who has followed through the entire thought process of exactly how and when they will lose weight has a much greater chance of success than somebody who has casually said they want to lose weight.

The Fix: Think through your goal in your mind and write down exactly what and when you’ll do everything that you need to do in order to realize your goal. The bottom line is defining the goal quantitatively and writing the steps down as if you were explaining to somebody else how they should accomplish your goal.

3. The Goal Is Not Realistic

The other major reason that most people do not stick to New Year’s Resolutions is that they make unrealistic goals. This usually means they jump straight to their dream goal without considering where they are with it right now and the amount of proverbial distance there is between them and their goal.

Not afraid to look stupid, I’ll tell you one of mine from a few years ago: “To make a million pounds”. You may laugh. And I’ll forgive you simply because I can now laugh at myself too.

I failed to realize that it’s a long way from no pounds to a million pounds. I failed to realize just how much a million pounds is. I didn’t do the maths. I didn’t have a workable and practical plan. But hey – I was young, naive and a little bit deluded.

The Fix: Make sure your goal is realistic. This does not necessarily mean “modest” but it means you have some reason believe that your goal can be achieved. There must be a line of logic which can be followed to the likely conclusion that you will reach you goal.

4. A Year Is Too Long

This is one of my greatest gripes with the term “New Year’s Resolution” – the implication that it’s allowed to take a year to reach the goal. For most things, a year is too long a time frame to influence action and leaves the door wide open to procrastination and the delaying of action.

The Fix: For small goals, set a realistic completion date. I can’t tell you exactly how to do this because it depends on the goal. You’ll have to use your own judgement. But for any goal that you think will take you longer than a month, you need to break it down into monthly sub-goals and then review your progress every month. If you have trouble remembering to review, set a reminder on your iPhone or Google Calendar.

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At the end of the day, you will succeed at your New Year’s Resolutions and goal achievement in general proportionally to how serious you are about it and the degree to which you really want the change to happen.

I wish you all the best with your resolutions this year.

#1. Get Up Earlier (at 7am every day including weekends -well, possibly not Sundays)

Being honest, I hate waking up early. Up to now, my definition of freedom has somewhere included the words “man should have the right to wake up naturally”. And this was all well and good until two things changed: First, I could not ignore the correlation between life success and early rising and this seemed like one of the simplest life changes I could make that would increase my momentum; and second… I got a girlfriend who wasn’t such a big fan of my getting up at close to noon or beyond on a Saturday. But I’m doing this because I want to and not because she wants me to. And it’s important that she, and everybody else, knows that. If I can succeed at this goal, it should lead to a great deal more productivity by adding an estimated 300 additional hours to the year.

The goal: Gradually adjust my sleeping pattern such that I can comfortably wake up at 7am every morning in a fit state of mind to get things done.

#2. Write, Produce & Direct My First Feature Film

After a rather unplanned entry into what I guess could be called my film career in 2011, in 2012 I aim to begin making a film of my own. This is a life time dream of mine and one that I have obstinately refused to allow to die since I was 10 years old.

I know for a fact this will not be easy and will probably be very hard work. It’s also an enormous financial risk and I could list 10 reasons right off the cuff why this could very easily go wrong. But some dreams you just can’t give up on. And if it was easy, everybody would be doing it.

The goal: To initiate production of a feature film with the intention of it being commercially successful either by cinema release (quite unlikely) or straight to DVD (more likely). Whether the film gets released in 2012 or 2013, we must reasonably believe by the end of 2012, that it will be finished.

Follow blog tag blockbuster or visit and follow the Mogul Films Blog for news of progress on this.

#3. Continue To Hone My Share Trading Skills And Become A Better Investor

One of my greatest achievements in 2011 has been to master the basics of stock trading, a field and subject that I previously did not even understand let alone attempt to dabble in. My success during 2011 has allowed me to grow my capital by an inflation beating 9%. What this means to the layman is that my investment portfolio, to put it simply, made me the same amount of money as a savings account that paid 9% interest would have, if such a thing existed, which it doesn’t.

In fact, no other venture I have involved myself with – and there have been a good few by now – has ever proved so profitable so quickly.

The goal: To grow my capital by 10% (after tax) on the balance at the close of 2011. Providing I don’t do anything stupid and another European country doesn’t need a bail out, this shouldn’t be too difficult.

Follow blog tag investing

#4. Start Doing Magic Again

Prior to starting my degree, magic was a very big part of my life. But as life changed and I reluctantly grew up, there were certain inevitable casualties. Magic was one of them. While I continued to manage and run MagicMegaStore.co.uk, my own skills as a performer atrophied to near extinction. This year I aim to revive the skills I once had and start performing again. As I remember, I used to enjoy it.

The goal: Start performing to actual people again.

#5. And This Year’s New Skill….. Learn To Draw

For the past couple of years, every year I have made an effort to learn a new skill. I think this is something everybody should do because it keeps life fresh. Learning also continues your individual evolution into a more rounded person. If is my belief that if your brain isn’t learning then it is dying.

This year I decided to learn to draw. I’m sure I’ll be posting my attempts on my blog as I go.

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I’ll end by wishing you all a happy, productive and prosperous New Year.

January 24th – Did my first stock trade. Bought shares in Centamin Egypt and made a profit of around £50 in 3 hours without doing anything. It was to be the first of many.

March 28th – Learned to ski in Italy. Very, very enjoyable week.

May 19th to 22nd – Went to New York City for the first time. Enjoyed it.

June 11th – Got my first acting credit in the Superman fan film Superman: Requiem. First time on a film set too. Lot of fun.

June 18th – Went to Film School at the Hollywood Film Institute’s London boot camp.

August 7th – Asked my girlfriend out. She said yes.

August 18th – Went to the Edinburgh Fringe Festival for the first time. Was a barrel of laughs. Enjoyed very much.

September 2nd – Turned 26. Had a party. Was nice.

September 22nd – Got another acting credit and did my first fight scene in the short action film “The Extraction” with Tony Cook on location in Essex. More fun times.

October 10th  - Made £1000 profit in 24 hours on the stock market dealing Amazon.com shares.

…And Thank You

To conclude, I’d just like to thank everybody who has contributed to my 2011. It has been an excellent year and I hope 2012 can be even better. Thank you. And God bless.

Number one: I grew up reading Total Film. I have quite a few issues of Total Film in my collection. Throughout my teenage years it was this magazine that fed my fantasies of making films myself one day. And now I’m directly connected with a film that is mentioned in it. And that’s kind of cool to me.

Total Film is one of the most widely read film magazines in the UK and I dare say that having the film mentioned in there, as well as where people can watch it, has the power to dramatically increase the audience that Superman Requiem is going to get. It could now potentially be watched by hundreds of thousands of people. I, for one, hope so.

Although I won’t see the film until the premier, I have seen the trailer and while I wondered why nobody actually talks in the trailer, the composition of some of the shots looks very professional and given the budget we were working with here, that’s a pretty impressive result.

My next post on Superman Requiem will probably follow the London premier in about a week in Covent Garden when I’ll see the film in its entirety for the first time. I am rather looking forward to it.

This is a passage from his latest book “Business Stripped Bare: Adventures of a Global Entrepreneur” which, I think, is particularly profound.

“Success” by Richard Branson

There are different paths that you can take in this life, and choosing the correct path is supremely important. And as if that weren’t pressure enough, it’s no good choosing not to choose, because that approach to life absolutely guarantees failure.

I don’t think there is enough attention and help given to young people in life to set them in the right direction. All young people deserve wise counsel. They need someone who can show them a  future. They need to be able to work out what they can do with their lives, how they can enjoy their lives, how they can pay for it and how they can take responsibility for their actions.

I think it’s a shame that we teach children everything about the world, but we don’t teach them how to take part in the world, how to realise an idea, how to measure the consequences of their actions, how to take a knock, or how to share their success. What kind of world have we built, that people can use the phrase ‘it’s just business’ without challenge or contradiction?

Entrepreneurship isbusiness’s beating heart. Entrepreneurship isn’t about cpital; it’s about ideas. A great deal of entrepreneurship can be taught, and we desperately need to teach it, as we confront the huge global challenges of the twenty-first centruy.

Entrepreneurship is also about excellence – not excellence measured in awards, or other people’s approcal, but the sort one achieves for oneself, be exploring what the world has to offer. I wrote to someone recently who, like me, is dyslexic. I said that it is important to look for one’s strengths – to try to excel at what you’re good at.

What you’re bad at actually doesn’t interest people, and it certainly shouldn’t interest you. However accomplished you become in life, the things you are bad at will always outnumber the things you’re good at. So don’t let your limits knock your self-confidence. Put them to one side and push yourself towards your strengths.

This, I think, is sound advice for the young. For those of you who’ve left youth behind, my advice would be: reread the paragraph above, adding exclamation marks after every sentence.

Because, in business, you always have a choice, and you always have an obligation to choose. With the right attitude, business will keep your mind eternally young, because business is always changing, changes always bring opportunities, and you can never hide from the changes that are round the corner.

In entrepreneuial business, a conservative mindset will hamstring you, defenseiveness will weaken you and a failure to face facts will killl you. Entrepreneurial business favours the open mind. It favours people whose optimism drives them to prepare for many possible futures, pretty much purely for the job of doing so. It favours people with a humane and engaged view of the world; people who can imagine themselves into the skin of their customers, their works and the people who are affected by their operations. Business favours people who, whne they see a problem or an injustice, try to do something about it. It favours pragmatists ovver perfectionists, adventurers over fantasists.

Done well and in the right spirit, business willl also bring success – whatever that is.

Indeed, how do you measure who’s truly successful? My list of the world’s most successful people includes Sir Freddie Laker – hardly an obvious choice, to go by the headlines, the rich lists and all the other paraphernalia of bsusiness celebrity. So let’s strip this particular business bare once and for all: when we talk baout success, what are we really talking about?

Are we talking about money? As a measure of success, money’s a crude one at best. People are always inquisitice about how ealthy other people are. It’s a fascinating subject and one that produces endless reams of copy and discussion. But the reality is that wealth is like a running stream of water. During some seasons the flow of money is a torrent and you’re inundated with cash. The next moment, you’ve put money in to develop a business and your cash flow dries up overnight leaving a barren riverbed.

So even the more well-researched rich lists have to take a bit of a potshot when arriving at their figures. There have been times I was almost bankrupt , and I was very glad to see my name in the Sunday Times Rich List, because I thouht it would assuage the bank manager. (Figures were often wildly off the mark both ways – but I wasn’t complaining.) In the last few years things have gone well for the Virgin Group. In 2008, it had  a reach  of nearly £12 billion.

And me? I’m rich. There – I said it. It’s quite an American thing to talk about wealth. In Britain we’re still sort of slightly embarrassed about it, and I think that’s a good thing. When I go to a party I see people, not bank statements, and I’d like to think that when people get chatting to me they feel the same. To be perfectly honest I hated the word ‘billionaire’ going into the title of that show I did for Fox. It was a great title, but it wasn’t my style at all. Money is only interesting for what it lets you do. On paper, if I was to sell up my shareoldings in the companies tomorrow, I would have considerable wealth. But where would be the fun in that?

If money is a poor guide to success in life, celebrity is worse. The media likes to personalise and simplify matters – and that’s understandable. It’s much easier to talk about Steve Jobs at Apple, Bill Gates at Microsoft or Richard Branson at Virgin, but that doesn’t really acknowledge that there’s  alegion of senior people doing significant jobs and making major decisions every day. Everyone wants to make business “simple” and that’s aone of my constant goals, but in reality there are certain complexities about running a media company, a space-tourism business or an airline. And the financial implications of running a global business across many jurisdictions require a substantial level of expert knowledge in accountancy, taxation and legal affairs, not forgetting the IT, marketing and HR functions too. I’ve never met a CEO who had all of those skills. Of course, the figurehead at the top does make significant strategic decisions but this is based on the work and capabilities of other people within hte business. We all still have the same number of hours in the working week. In successful businesses, working hard is never confined to one or two people – you’ll usually find a strong work ethic runs right through the company.

If neither money nor celebrity really encapsulates what success is about, what about personal power? I’ve been asked what happens if Richard Branson’s own balloon bursts: isn’t the Virgin Group far too reliant on one individual? I have kokingly replied that during our spell running Virgin Records, we always found that when a major rock-music artist died the records sales went through the roof.

I have spent over thirty-five years building the Virgin brand, and if I do get run over tomorrow, I think it will live on without me, just as Google will live on without its founders, and Microsoft will live on without Bill Gates. For me, the major job has been done. A lot of people worked exceptionally hard in the early years to build the brand. With or without me, Virgin will be around for many years to come.

Is this power? In a sense, I suppose it is. But the idea that I somehow “control” the brand is a bit sinister and silly. I gave birth to the brand. I’ve nurtured and I continue to nurture it. I brought it into being, and I champion it. Thinking about it is one of the things that gets me up in the morning. But you can’t really control ideas.

The other thing that gets me up in the morning is the idea of making a difference. It’s why I’ve never wanted to run a big company, and it’s why I get a huge enjoyment out of creating and tending to lots of smaller ones. (I have to be careful of my terms here, because airlines are hardly small companies! But I hope by now that you know what I’m getting at.) Virgin, by remembering what it is to be a small entrepreneur, has made large amounts of positive difference in many diverse business areas.

I think that the more you’re actively and practically engaged, the more successful you will feel. Actually, that might even be my definition of success. Right now, I find myself doing more and more to help safeguard our future on this planet. Does that make me successful? It certainly makes me happy.

I think that you can see that my definition of success in business has nothing to do with profits solely for their own sake. This is very important. Success for me is whether you have created something that you can be really proud of. Profits are necessary to invest in the next project – and pay the bills, repay investors and reward all the hard work – but that’s all. Nobody should be remembered for how much money they have made in life. Whether you die with a billion dollars in your bank account or $20 under your pillow is actually not that interesting. That’s not what you’ve achieved in life. What matters is whether you’ve created something special – and whether you’ve made a real difference to other people’s lives. Entrepreneurs, scientists and artists who died as paupers are often the heroes.

Successful people aren’t in possession of secrets known only to themselves. Don’t obsess over people who appear to you to be ‘winners’, but listen instead to the wisdom of people who’ve led enriching lives – people, for instance, who’ve found time for friends and family. Be generous in your interpretation of what success looks like. The best and most meaningul lives don’t always end happily. My friend Madiba spent twenty-seven years of his life in prison. If he had died there, would his life hold no lessons for us?

In business, as in life, all that matters is that you do something positive. Thanks for reading – and enjoy your life. You only get one.

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If you don’t have a copy of Business Stripped Bare, I strongly recommend it.

And now as the nation suffers from an epidemic of Apple fever once again, not a single conversation in a social gathering going by without somebody asking a question about the new iPhone, I must daily be reminded of my big mistake.

It was August 2011 and I’d had some luck day trading with AAPL shares for a few weeks, pocketing a few hundred pounds here and there. But one thing struck me about Apple Inc that meant I could make more on a longer term hold than I was doing pocketing quick cash on an almost daily basis: the 2 year chart.

As two year charts go, Apple has one of the most impressive that I can find. And you don’t need to know anything about trading to understand that. Key Stage 3 mathematics is enough to know that on a price/time graph, if the line seems generally to go up up and to the right, over a two year period, this is a company whose value is growing, and with a new generation of iPhone rumoured to be on the horizon, I couldn’t see how I could lose.

So, one otherwise regular lunch time I bought a bunch of Apple shares – £15,000 worth. I won’t lie, as I clicked the “Buy Now” button I began to feel slightly dizzy and delerious and my heart rate was raised for the rest of the day. But all would be fine, I told myself, the price will rise.

A few weeks later, I was over £1000 down. I wasn’t worried though, the price would definitely go back up.

Now anybody thinking that this is the story where I stick to my guns as the share price falls and falls until I lose my entire investment is in for a surprise, because yes, the price did go back up and towards the end of September I was staring at a profit of £2500. Sweet! A month’s wages for free for just clicking a few buttons. I certainly couldn’t complain.

The first mistake I made then and as I think back now, I deserved to be sectioned for my decision, was not to sell. That kind of profit was serious. But hey, when they release the iPhone 5 – which they haven’t even said they’re going to do – the price will go up even more. I was a greedy idiot. And in hind site it was mighty freakin’ stupid to base such a huge financial decision on an assumption made regarding the actions of a company world famous for their secretiveness. But hey, you live and learn or crash and burn.

The share price of course fell, since there was no basis for such a high price in the first place. It fell all the way back down to what I’d bought it for and then hovered around $400 a share for a few weeks. I was nowhere near the profit I could have had.

And here I made mistake numero deux: Allowing the profit that I hadn’t banked inside my personal boundary and feeling entitled to it. In my rather deluded mind, now, to sell for less than two and a half thousand pounds profit was considered a loss. Well, a huge loss I was about to make!!!

I was hoping my shares would rise in value following Apple’s keynote on October 5^th. I excitedly tuned in live online to watch the keynote and hear the new CEO, Tim Cook, unviel the iPhone 5. But, of course we now know, he never did.

As soon as that became apparent, Apple’s share price dropped like a stone all the way to $340 a share. I got scared. I was already holding a sizeable stake in Baidu.com that was currently in loss, I couldn’t afford to hold another larger stake in Apple that was worth less than I bought it for.

October 5^th was possibly the single most stressful day of 2011.

Was it time to exit? I really didn’t want to. Not least because of mistake number 3:

My third mistake was to trade US shares using a Halifax Sharedealing account. While Halifax Sharedealing does allow you to buy and sell NASDAQ stocks, I would not recommend anybody to do so.

Here’s why:

The “Current Valuation” screen in a Halifax Sharedealing Account shows valuations that are twenty minutes old which I think is pretty pitiful of a bank to do since there are free iPhone apps and now even the iPhone iOS 5 firmware that give you current and real time stock prices. But that’s not the worst thing. The worst thing is that Halifax for some reason think it would be helpful of them to show you the valuation of your NASDAQ investments (which you buy and sell in US dollars) in GBP at an exchange rate they don’t tell you.

The massive problem with this is that if and when you have to make a hasty exit from an investment, it’s near impossible to figure out what you’re going to get. You can’t use the real time stock price you can get from Google Finance because you don’t know the exchange rate; and you can’t use the price that Halifax is giving you because at the end of the day it’s twenty minutes old and to all intents and purposes, useless.

But that’s not all. There’s more.

I have tested this four or five times and the result is always the same. From the second you click “Sell” on an international order from a Halifax sharedealing account, you can watch the shareprice in Google Finance and see that it doesn’t move much. But there will be a difference of £200-£300 between what Halifax’s current valuation quoted you’ll get and what you actually end up with. I have found this out the hard way a couple of times because on certain trades where the profit was less than £300, Halifax pocketed my entire profit leaving me with less than I started with.

I phoned them about this a couple of times rather angrily, only to be sold some twaddle about market conditions and that the current valuation screen is merely indicative. They refused to accept on both occassions that they were at fault and would not even acknowledge that you lose £300 on an international trade, let alone explain why it happens.

I have since stopped trading with them altogether for two reasons, one being the one I just explained and the other being their refusal to provide a frequent trader tarriff which reduces your commission fees if you trade a certain number of times per quarter, a critereon I think I could easily satisfy.

So in the midst of the keynote, shortly after the announcement of iPhone 4S, a lame and only incrementally updated version of the iPhone 4, stricken by fear and nudged along by a friend of mine, I sold my shares in Apple, put them through Halifax’s international dealing black box, not knowing how much money I’d be left with after the sale, and that was that.

I laughed histerically when I did the maths and discovered I had made a profit of £9.50!

So there you have it. It could have been my most successful trade to date. Instead, it turned out to be worse than putting the money in a savings account.

So, in summary:

• Don’t be a greedy idiot. Be grateful for profit and bank it thankfully. Selling at a profit is never a bad thing to do.
• Do NOT make any trading decision whatsoever on an impulse. In mine and the experience of several traders who I know, this always leads to losing money unnecessarily.
• Do not ever trade international stocks from a Halifax trading account. It’s dumb. Go for HSBC or Barclays instead.

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:

#1. Absolutely NOTHING is certain. Had I known this just a couple of weeks ago, I would have sold my stake in Apple Inc and pocketed around £2000 instead of keeping it in the delusional knowledge that when the iPhone 5 was released, it would be worth even more than that. And that’s possibly the most valuable lesson that I’ve learned this month.

#2. If a stock drops 10% in a day, there’s something going on, and it’s probably best to sell out there and then, even if it means making a loss. I’m talking specifically about Baidu.com (BIDU), which I bought the day before it began to tank. Unlucky? Possibly. But all the same, I would have limited the loss had I just sold on a 10% loss, instead of now possibly having to sustain a 30% loss.

#3. When the entire market is falling several days on the trot, DO NOT buy regular equities until circumstances change. There’s no point. Yes, you may be getting stock at a cheap price, but it’s going to go down more tomorrow and then you could have got it cheaper.

#4. Do not trade 100% of your capital all at once. A big part of trading is risk management. And it’s just bad management to tie all of your cash into investments at once, especially when all of those investments are similar. Tying up all your capital means a few things. It means you have no free cash to take advantage of unimaginably cheap stock prices. If you have cash for this, a market crash can be a blessing.

#5. No stock is special. All stocks rise and fall. Every stock is sometimes overbought and therefore overpriced and sometimes oversold and therefore under-priced. No stock is exempt from influence by market conditions. Some stocks are resistant to recession but all are affected.

#6. Profit isn’t yours until you bank it. It doesn’t matter how much profit your holdings grid shows, none of it is yours until you bank it. It’s very easy to get happy over “winning” money that you haven’t banked yet. I did it with Apple last month. When the shares were trading at $420 each and my grid was showing £2250 profit. I was over the moon. It would have been my biggest win to date. But I didn’t sell. Then I felt cheated when I did sell for a lot less. I had no right to feel cheated. The £2250 was never mine. Next time, I’ll bank it.

#7. Buy at close of market rather than when it opens. It’s nice and easy to review the day’s action on an evening, after market has closed, find some delicious oversold stock and plan what you’re going to do the following morning. The truth is that by that time, everybody else has found it too – including Wall Street – and it’s tough, if not impossible, to get the stock at the cheap prices you spied it at. For the private investor, it’s a lot more lucrative to look at stocks just as the market is closing and buy in then, a step ahead of everybody else. This is best way to get absolute bargain prices.

#8. For more stability and less risk, vary your portfolio. When things are going well, as they did for me in the first two weeks of September, and I’m raking in thousands from superstar stocks like Amazon.com and Apple Inc, this will seem like a distant concern. But when it all goes wrong, it’s good for both your portfolio and your well-being, to have a varied portfolio – not necessarily in various industries though that might help, but in various share types.

For example my portfolio when I started was 100% NASDAQ growth shares. This means no dividends. And USD. If the exchange rate between GBP and USD changed for the worse, it affected my entire portfolio. Also, if the entire market dropped (as it did), it meant either selling everything on a loss or hanging in for the long haul while I waited for the market to correct. In some respects, I’m still waiting for this correction.

My updated portfolio now comprises of UK high-yield dividend stock as well as NASDAQ growth shares. Some of these stocks I picked up at bargain prices which, if I wait long enough, guarantees me upside over time, and dividends while I wait.

#10. No matter how bad things appear to be, the market will always correct. It’s a fact. And the lesson I wanted to end the article with. Because in a world that’s characteristically insecure, this is the saving grace. When £64 billion disappeared in a single day and a friend of mine posted on my Facebook wall, “You must be made of steel to be holding stocks right now.” Two days later, 2/3 of my UK investments had recovered and I sold up for a £250 profit. Eventually, the market always corrects.

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It’s been an exciting, interesting and action packed month. I’ve made a lot of money. There are few ventures (okay, none) that I’ve dabbled in and managed to double my monthly income within my first month – single-handedly. And as long as I learn these lessons and learn them well, the path to self-improvement and better trading starts here.

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:

My love of magic and illusion has over the years transpired into a love of live entertainment in general. Stand-up comedy inevitably falls under that umbrella.

If you’ve never been to the Fringe and you don’t know what it is, let me explain. It’s a comedy festival primarily, though magic does have a place there. And it’s like having live sky plus available but where every channel is a comedy show. What could be better!?Some shows are free and some shows you have to pay for. This is the festival at which pretty much every comedian you’ve ever seen on television EVER, started out.

The headline act we went to see was Dave Gorman, the man behind what is, in my opinion, the best one man stage show ever – Dave Gorman’s Googlewhack Adventure. If you’ve never seen it, grab the DVD, it’s only a fiver and I challenge you to not laugh at it.

Dave Gorman’s Powerpoint Presentation Review

Gorman’s new show, titled, quite aptly, Dave Gorma’s Powerpoint Presentation, was definitely on a parr with Googlewhack. The title gives nothing away other than that it involves Dave Gorman (an important detail I think) and that it is a powerpoint presentation (also important). But it could have been about anything.

What followed, and you can quote me on this, was “an hour of Grade A Gorman” telling the quirky and weird autobiographical anecdotes that we all love him for.

Covering a multitude of topics and weirdities, from why a lot of people seem to think he’s Jewish, to HTC phone advertising fun and games on Twitter.

This doesn’t happen very often, and maybe it was partially due to my not getting a decent night’s sleep for the two weeks running up to me seeing the show, but I laughed so hard that it hurt. My abdominal muscles simply would not work any faster.

Immediately upon leaving the show, I tweeted such…

I thought he’d appreciate my feedback!

And he did…

Then, I did what I had failed to do in Bradford last year, I met Dave after the show and got this signed book! If I was a bit more organized I would have had a camera and would be able to post a photo, which would come off a lot less braggy than me telling you in words that I met Dave Gorman. But I did. And I am.

Other Shows I Saw

Other than Dave Gorman, we spent the rest of our time watching the Free Fringe – shows you don’t have to pay for.

Ashley Frieze was very funny. I enjoyed his half hour in the comedy picnic enormously. Which is more than I can say for the guy who followed him. I can’t remember his name (which is good for him in this case) but he was from Manchester and succeeded only in taking a very warm audience and turning them stone cold in only a few minutes.

Sophie Alderson Is Running For President. My three word review – “waste of time”. It was one of the less popular free shows, performed in a less than ideal location to an audience of only a handful. It started badly, got progressively worse and the less said about the end the better. Based on the (pretty bad) idea of a focus group about what people wanted a president to be like, the show failed to amuse in every way except for the parody songs. My advice to Sophie would be to dump the rest of the show and write a new show featuring more parody songs. Play to your strengths.

Gerry Howell‘s show “Moonshine and Trumpery” was a return to the level of Ashley Frieze. While I liked Ashley’s style better, Gerry did get pretty big laughs throughout the show, quite a few of them at my expense, since I made the mistake of almost nodding off on the front row. Stupid, I know.

Finally, we moved venues to The Three Sisters to watch Liam Mullone‘s “Down To The Bone”. He reminded me of Jack Dee, who is one of my favourite comedians, and I enjoyed his performance. I felt kind of bad at the end when he apologized on stage for what he considered to be a less than ideal performance on account of the flu he was suffering from. Had he stuck around by the door as many comedians do in the free shows, I would have told him that I thought he did well, but instead he went and hid behind a red sheet until everybody had gone.

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I enjoyed my first time at the Edinburgh festival and will definitely make an effort to come back next year and stay for longer.