Investment blog

I've decided to start a blog about investing. Like many of you, I am an amateur but I am eager to learn and hopefully earn some money in the process.

You can read it at http://theupsanddownsofanamateurinvestor.blogspot.ie/.

I hope you enjoy it. Advice and topics for discussion are always welcome.

Fair play to you. Best of luck with the project.

Would it be possible to occasionally let us know when you make updates to your blog?

Sure, I can update this thread whenever I post. I aim to post at least weekly. My next post will be about my experience with buying shares and EFTs with DeGiro.

You can automatically subscribe to new posts on the blog using an RSS feed reader. There are dozens of different ones around, and your email client may even provide support for it. I'm using Microsoft Outlook which works just fine.

For this particular blog, using your feed reader's facility for adding a feed, add the following:

http://theupsanddownsofanamateurinvestor.blogspot.ie/feeds/posts/default?alt=rss

Note: the idea is that you copy and paste the feed URL above into your feed reader. You can also click on the above link itself and try the "Subscribe using" popup, but I can't tell you how or if this works.

There are some alternative feeds you can opt for, documented here.

Thanks but for technical morons like myself sabre Man's kind offer of an update here would be greatly appreciated!

In order to learn from your experience can I suggest you include the following information on your site:

- The trading costs involved in making your investments
- The names of the funds selected
- The logic for choosing the funds and why so many
- Over all diversification in terms of sector, geography, asset allocation and currency.

It would also be useful to understand your general financial position, target asset allocation and objectives for your investments.

Good luck , I'm not sure if your a total novice like myself or are familiar with investing. If I could offer some advice in investing I would say have a clear plan and stick with it, if you are going to invest every 3/6/9 whatever months then set a reminder or phone or PC and follow it through ignore the news , there will always be be someone predicting a crash etc.

Really try imagine how you would feel if you invest and that money you invested halved in value the week after you invested , try hard to imagine it losing 10% a week for a few weeks are you going to pull it out.

Discipline is the key to success imo, Ive made a good few mistakes since I started investing last year, I wasn't as educated and still aren't but I'm getting there , the tax treatment plays on my mind still , I'm noticing that individual shares move in line with the whole market eg if the s&p500 drops 3% most individual shares drop between 1-4% , for some reason I would have expected that not to be the case , I would have expected more shares to be up and down , but that could be just the climate we are in at the moment where the whole stock market is just dropping on China news . (sorry I'm waffling on!) but my point was in gathering more confidence that eventually i may go the direct share route instead of index investing . It's possible of course to do both side by side.

If you download the holdings of say MSCI world and see just exactly what you own for one share it gives me anyway confidence that your getting massive diversification , I worried a lot about loss relief but in fact you are getting loss relief against the other shares in the basket if you get me so it's not a huge disadvantage . All the best look forward to the blog. Not many of the knowledgable regulars that post advice here (very good advice ) actually share what they are invested in (sarenco I'm looking at you and Jim !) so well done for taking the plunge !

Fella said:

...I'm noticing that individual shares move in line with the whole market eg if the s&p500 drops 3% most individual shares drop between 1-4% , for some reason I would have expected that not to be the case , I would have expected more shares to be up and down , but that could be just the climate we are in at the moment where the whole stock market is just dropping on China news . (sorry I'm waffling on!) but my point was in gathering more confidence that eventually i may go the direct share route instead of index investing .

Click to expand...

Don't want to hijack the thread, but I also notice this and wonder if maybe one of the longer time investors could comment on whether this more concerted movement of the whole market has always been the case. Things do seem to move in lockstep with "global" news, with oil prices, and most especially with news of a possible rate rise by the Fed. That last is the scariest of all -- the idea that a sign of a recovering US economy would be taken as negative for stocks adds to the feeling that the current market is in a bubble predicated on the availability of mountains of cheap liquidity.

I think computer trading is making stock markets move together, and exaggerating the underlying move. There are many markets and sectors at multi year lows like emerging markets and commodities. But this was also the case a year ago. I'm no expert by the way I'm down much more than the general market this year. Emerging markets was the future 5 years, now that has been thrown out the window and everything emerging market has been sold even though already cheap and even countries like Poland which has been growing steadily for years.

Well, stock prices have always moved in tandem, to some extent, in response to macro events (changing expectations in relation to interest rates, political events, etc.). Arguably, the increased popularity of index investing over the last few years has caused a secular increase in correlation between index components (and decreased dispersion), although that is obviously very difficult to actually prove.