Chart thread, page-920

Does anyone only trade a few hundred? I would have thought the minimum for an investor would be about 3k.

Then, it would be a gain of $300 with trading costs no more than about $40. I know a profit of $260 is not very exciting, but for a young person starting out, it just pushes them on a little further. It is building that base that is by far the toughest part of share market investing.

This is what Buffett used to do all of the time. I did it for myself and for my kids, though it is probably my kids situation that is most instructive.

When they were born my father bought them both $1,000 (500 shares) worth of AFI (the most boring company on the ASX, I know) but AFI used to have these issues all of the time where they'd offer shareholders to buy more shares at a discount to the prevailing price. Each time they did it, I'd sell their entire holding knowing that I could pick the shares up in the issue or buy them back on the market (on the market was usually better if it was close to the issue price because I could choose exactly how many shares I could buy back). They'd usually pick up 8-10% more shares each time. When they started that meant picking up 40-50 shares which doesn't sound/isn't much. However, their dividends were reinvested, and those little opportunities came more than a dozen times between the time they were born and graduating, and that 500 shares turned into 5,000 shares (they were about $6 then) so they finished up with about $30k in AFI. Along the way they also had part-time jobs which they expanded into other large, stable, stocks. Even without partners both were able to buy their first home within a year of graduating. Those little boring moves changed their lives.

As an old and boring investor, that has done pretty well over the years, I've had surprisingly few really massive wins. People love to play tattslotto, but few have become wealthy doing that, and even if they do don't have the skills to hang on to their money. Life's just not like that - we all see the guy we've never heard of suddenly have the massive hit, or win a gold medal, and people love the romance and glory of the huge win. But that's what is seen from a distance. Get close up and the big wins are the culmination of hundreds or even thousands of small moments that no one notices, and dismissed as insignificant.

To my mind that was what the AL3 CR was all about. Another small moment, another chance to push forward a little bit further.

As for tax, every time I let that get in the way of decision making I lose money. Eventually, if you make money you're going to pay tax. If you pay a lot of tax, you've made a lot of money - there are worse things in life.