Dail,I've been a hotcopper member for 10 years now. One thing i...

Dail,

I've been a hotcopper member for 10 years now. One thing i have learnt (that hard way) is that there are a number of posters who trade on hotcopper. By this I mean that they are interested in very short to medium term investment. My guess is that you are an investor and your broker has put you into Bluescope because he believes it is undervalued and has a lot of upside over the coming years. When i first started "investing" in shares I worried too much about day to day movements and forgot about the big picture. I was a little too young and naive to realise that 5 years is not very long. All i wanted to know was how much i could make by Xmas. On days or weeks when the market went down, I panicked and wanted out. On the days when the market went up I wanted in so i wouldn't miss the boat.

Here is a lesson i have learnt. And as i said, i learnt it the hard way. It is a cliche, but ask yourself or ask your parents or friends, "how often do they get their homes valued?". Do you look online every day to see what the housing market is doing? Why do we treat houses and shares differently? The answer is, "we really shouldn't". Another good bit of advice is to get any chart of any stock and get a 5 or 10 year chart and look at the trend. Then it will open your eyes. Of course, the GFC is supposed to be a 1 in 100 year event, so if you were smart to take your profits after such a bull market, then you would be a rich man.

I don't know how many times i used to look at charts and think to myself how lucky people were to buy that stock at such a low price and then would see it had increased 4 or even sometimes 10 fold.

Anyway, just sit back, relax, know that you have bought at low prices and think about what price it could be in a few years. It is amazing how a stock can just hover around a certain price then all of a sudden in a few months it goes gangbusters. Then the 2 or 3 years of waiting can sometimes be rewarding in only a few months. Just don't worry. Reinvest your divis, but extra stocks on dips and ride the market. Oh, and grabe a 10 year chart of the ASX or DJIA and see where we are at.

Good luck!