The Stock Market for Beginners: Cutting to the Chase
Stock market for beginners? I remember how stupid I felt later!
It was my first time “investing”. I felt so grown up!
I was just out of my teens, living in one room with a pet alligator. I had £20 in a savings account at the main branch of one of the largest London banks.
Imagine this place: dark polished wood, glittering brass, muted lighting, a ceiling several stories in the gloom above…a place where whispers seemed more appropriate than normal conversation, where staff stole from place to place as if wearing slippers.
I called the manager from a pay phone. The manager! Of a place like a cathedral! And he actually answered the phone. No gatekeeper: here was the Big Cheese himself!
“I have some money,” I said, “and I want to invest the entire amount. What do you recommend?”
I did not know until years later when some were brokerage clients of mine that most bank managers know virtually nothing about investing. I just expected that as banks dealt with money their managers must know how to invest it.
He suggested a South African goldmine that I later discovered was so obscure it was listed in just one newspaper in Britain - the most expensive one specializing in investments and written in a language half of which I did not understand. It certainly did not explain the stock market for beginners.
For several weeks I watched this ridiculous South African stock add a penny only to fall a penny the next day over and over again while I spent lots of pennies daily on a newspaper so I could read one minuscule line of type.
A month later, I phoned the bank manager again. “I don’t think this stock is very good. Please sell my entire holding!”
How he didn’t bust a gut laughing I will never know. London bankers must starch and iron their faces!
This was 55 years ago, the start of a very successful private and professional career as an investor.
My time is now devoted to helping others avoid the multiple mistakes I made. When you realize a 25-year-old must save double the amount of a 20-year-old to get a similar result in retirement (and a 29-year-old must save three times as much) you appreciate in the stock market for beginners the tremendous value of time and the urgency of starting early and with a definite and protective plan.
Investing successfully is easy! Forget all the mumbojumbo handed out by a self-important investment industry that would be without work if everyone knew how simple it truly is.
We will reduce the hogwash in this space and come up with bare and simple essentials. The rules I will provide you are logical and most can be proved with a basic pocket calculator. No degree is needed (or any particular amount of intelligence).
You will learn a method to protect against inevitable falling markets and the panic they cause. You will see how to take control of your own financial future instead of leaving it in the hands of a commission-based salesman. You will learn in a few weeks what took me 55 years to learn.
As we go along, please ask questions through my website and I will do my best to answer them; just don’t ask for my latest stock tip. You will learn how easy it is to choose good stocks yourself - and how little the selection really matters under the protective conditions I will give you. Those who agonize over each choice largely waste their time; there is a better way once you know how.
If you want instant wealth you will not get it here. If you’re looking for excitement, thrills and spills, you won’t get them here. But if you want a careful, patient system that will bring you better returns than you probably get now, or if you’re in your 20s or 30s and you want a solid shot at retiring a millionaire, stay right here.
All this on one hour a year - just 60 minutes every 365 days. Think this is unrealistic? You won’t after you have read this series: The Stock Market for Beginners.
by Sydney Tremayne
