CTG starts ‘learning the markets’, bakers rejoice

02 Nov 2010, Posted by Cape Town Girl in CTG, CTG recommends, bloggers, cape town, field guides, lifestyle, money money money, sponsors, 15 Comments

So I’m learning to buy and sell (at a profit) shares on the stock market through GlobalTrader, a company who enables you to trade on behalf of yourself, online. Being a complete novice to this world, they sent a very patient broker by the name of Mark through who gave me a crash course in trading. I wrote some notes. Let me refer to them.

Wish he was riding a bull so could make a pun about 'owning the bull markets', or something.

Firstly, he explained what kind of stock I’d be trading. I’ll be trading CFDs (Contract For Difference) which basically allows me to trade with more money that I have already invested. For example, I’m starting off with R10 000, but a CFD will allow me to trade to the value of R20 000, and the difference will be loaned to me by Globaltrader. Great if you know what you’re doing but don’t have too much money to play with.

GlobalTrader makes the whole system very easy, because you just download an app that sits on your desktop and you watch your shares throughout the day. If you decide you want to buy or sell, you can do it right there on the app, instead of calling your broker. You can call him too, which I sometimes like to do, just because Mark is nice to chat to.

In my crash course I learnt this: there are 3 things you can do when trading: Buy, Sell, or do nothing, and sometimes, doing nothing is better than both buying or selling. So really, ‘trading is like a metaphor for life’.

When choosing which shares to buy, there are 2 ways of doing it: 1) you can look at the charts or 2) you can do some fundamental research into the background of the company. You should probably do a bit of both, but I quite like the second, because I like understanding how business impacts people and rides trends and shizz. For eg, I happen to know that despite the fact that never have we been more educated about the dangers of smoking, never have we been heavier smokers (hardcore!) and that fascinates me, and even though it saddens me, I might just invest in British American Tobacco, because never have cigarettes been this expensive! What a crazy intense mind-puzzle of a socio-economic party!

Anyway every morning I’ll be checking in with GlobalTrader and we’ll be ‘discussing how my CFDs are doing’, and they will help me make buying and selling decisions until I feel confident enough to do it on my own. So watch this space – I’ll be letting you know how it goes. My next step would be to decide where I’m going to buy. I’m thinking fashion, technology and financial institutions would be my first port of call. Oh, and MTN, because they are a progressive company that invests in bloggers.

Yes people – this is my turn to GIVE BACK to the corporations that have nurtured me so well. Excited! Click here to read more about how I’ll be working with GlobalTrader as part of their What’s Stopping You campaign.