For years I have been intrigued by the business of buying and selling shares but since I am pretty clueless about the actual process I have always stayed clear mainly as I had no clue where to even begin.
Recently though I was introduced to a new app called GetStocks which apparently made it a whole lot easier so I thought I would give it a try. It claimed to be a social network stock trading platform which sounded exactly like the kind of thing that I may be good at.
No, I’m certainly no Wolf of Wall Street so wasn’t about to invest my life savings (not that there’s much) into some risky tech company of the likes, my plan was to make a few small trades until I got the hang of the whole thing. I downloaded the app onto my iPhone and registered as a new account, and before long I was good to go!
Still clueless I scrolled through the lots of markets on offer, you can trade on the US, UK and German stock exchanges and for beginners like me you can pay a premium to follow other users and see what they are trading on. I decided to go in blind though and take a few risks.
I looked through the companies (it lists them along with their logos so they are easy to recognise) and made my first couple of trades. Starbucks, BP, Twitter (the biggest loss-maker that I invested in), Burberry and Paddy Power got my money. I should have done a little more research but my aim was just to see how things worked so the companies were not too important. They do charge you a transaction fee which varies depending on the market you are buying on so don’t go doing deals willy nilly or you will rack up quite a bill.
Well, I made my trades, the next step was to wait I guess. I waited a few days and had not made any money yet so I told myself to be patient. The good thing about the GetStocks app is that it is always available and can monitor your assets around the clock.
Unfortunately for me though I don’t quite think the trading thing is for me as after a month of using it I had made only a few quid. A positive none the less as it could have been a loss of a few quid instead. I think with a little more research and patience I could have perhaps done a whole lot better.
One thing that I took away from it though was that trading is not as daunting as it seems when using an app like this anyway. Even I, a total novice managed to navigate it with ease and came out a few quid up in the end!
