02/01/2025
Teach yourself to invest
__Include your family in the journey, too!
I have shared this story before: When I was at boarding school, one of my teachers decided he was going to teach some of us how to trade in shares: “Let’s just pretend you each have £100 to invest," he said. "You will now open an account with a Stock Broker and instruct him when to buy and sell.”
It was really that simple. We each had a little notebook and we wrote down the companies in which we wanted to invest. Over the weeks and months that followed, the “Master” [as we called them] set us up as "Investor Clubs" that discussed companies and we quickly learnt that the more we knew about companies, the more we could make better informed decisions.
It didn’t take long before even the most average guys [in terms of class marks] really had the hang of it. They became avid readers of the company news, and knew the daily stock performance of UK companies.
Now here is the secret: I never stopped! I still do it... with both pretend AND real money! I get daily reports on stock picks and I enjoy chatter amongst the very loud traders and investors. Lol!
Turning to you: What stops you from doing the same?
Nothing!
You can do it with companies on your local exchange or just about any exchange in the world. There are now sophisticated tools and platforms to do this. But you can also do it with a simple notebook and mobile phone.
“Don’t fear from a distance,” my mother would always say.
You don’t have to have real money to actually train yourself. In the US most workers have their own real share accounts and I have heard taxi drivers discussing share performance just like some of you discuss sports results! There are so many credible online resources where you can . And include your kids and friends in the journey. Why not?
I follow African stock markets [for fun] and I could actually tell you which ones are good and which are just ornaments, whilst others are really not great at all. [I could tell you which ones, but I won't so don't ask me. It's up to you to come to your own informed conclusions through research].
My youngest daughter is actually a very good investor, and she has been doing it with pocket money since she was at school [and I can assure it was not a lot, because we are not that kind of parents!]
So why don’t you go out today and open your own “pretend share account” of say $10,000 and let’s discuss your own performance in six months. I am really serious about this. The only thing stopping you is your own .
African Child, listen to me: “Don’t fear from a distance. Don’t call yourself 'knee high to a grasshopper'. You must boldly step forward and learn these things.”
Image credit: KWB-Ubuntu Hope via AI. "Technology is just a tool. In terms of getting kids together and motivating them, the teacher is the most important..." [But my friends, remember: here you can teach yourself, too].
