SHARES!!!!

Hi Johann,

Best way to start would be a forum for the stockmarket called http://www.hotcopper.com.au, much like this one. Tons and tons of very knowledgable people. The onlything you need to watch out for is posters there may not always be posting with you best interests at heart i.e if they have bought a stock and want the S.P to go up they may post overly favourly for it which is called 'ramping'. The opposite also occurs with people wanting to drive the price down who will try to create doubt in the minds of investors and spook them into selling so they can buy in cheaper. You will soon be able to pick your way through the rubbish and get a feel for what is real or not. That asside many posters generously provide an extriadinary amount of research they have conducted-so you best bet is to research the companies as much as possible, get a feel for what the market is doing and then make a 'informed' judgement.

As for making a consistant $250 a week. Well like anything in life there are no garauntees-if you could make $250 a week by the same token you could also make $250,000 a week. While trading is fun (and stressful at times lol) research has shown buy and hold normally have better returns than traders. So for someone starting off I would suggest doing some reading and picking a stock that you are happy to hold for at least a few months, if not at least a year or two. WIth many stocks that have high volume trading it is quite easy to make 5-10% in a day, the trouble is picking when to get out, as it is also just as easy to loose 5-10% in a day. For that reason only invest what you have i.e dont buy shares with money you dont have-becasue uf the S.P drops you want to be able to have the option of holding and waiting for it to pick back up rather than being forced to sell at a loss (I learnt that one early…)

As for what stocks to look at, well at the moment the agriculture sector is very hot. The world is getting more and more populated and you have probably seen many reports on present and looming food shortages. In addition we have places like India and China who are becoming more affulent and changing their diets to a more wesstern one of grains and meat. Also the U.S has a big push for bio fuels made from corn etc. As a result agriculture is set to explode and in turn all assosciated inputs and outputs.

All these factors point towards phosphate prices seeing continued high prices as they are rerquired for high yeild crops. There is a shortage of phosphate at the moment, China have put a 130% tariff on all phos exports to try to hold their reserves etc. My personal fav is MAK, who are sitting on a large phospahte deposit in the N.T, and by all acoounts should be trading at between $20-$40 a year when they commence exporting in 2010. At the moment they are around $2.35, up from around 35 cents a few months ago. Please do you own research though-MAK is obviously my fav, but as with all things nothing is garuanteed. 

If you are a more conservative, risk averse investor obviously the blue chips would be the go. After copping such a hiding in recent months many analysts feel they would be good buying even if they could drop a little more potentialy, in the long run they will be fine.

Hope I helped a little-any more questions feel free to ask

Hi Johann

You might also want to look at http://www.learnshares.com.au/.  They are an educational group that teach mechanical trading.  If this is the kind of trading you would like to do then they're good in terms of offering seminars and access to coaches as part of the membership fees. 

I recommend the free introductory seminar to see what they really do (you'll pick up a few good tips at it too:)