Profiting from the PWC Money Tree
"The hardest part seems to be knowing exactly when to sell the stock.  Well yes, that's the problem with all stock investing. Reports come out all the time, sometimes even from very smart people with no motivation to lie, about expected earnings for this company, or for that industry. Whether those predictions come true is something you will only find out with time. What you are considering is using financial information available to you (and equally available to the public) to make investment choices. This is called 'fundamental analysis'; that is, the analysis of the fundamentals of a business and what it should be worth. It forms the basis of how many investment firms decide where to put their money.  In a perfectly 'efficient' market, all information available to the public is immediately factored into the market price for that company's stock. ie: if a bank report states with absolute certainty (through leaked documents) that Coca-Cola is going to announce 10% revenue growth tomorrow, then everyone will immediately buy Coca-Cola stock today, and then tomorrow there would be no impact. Even if PwC is 100% accurate in its predictions, if the rest of the market agrees with them, then the price at the time of IPO would equal the future value of the cashflows, meaning there would be no gain unless results surpassed expectations. So what you are proposing is to take one sliver of the information available to the public (have you also read all publicly available reports on those businesses and their industries?), and using that to make a high risk investment. Are you going to do better than the investment firms that have teams of researchers and years of experience in the investment world? You can do quite well by picking individual stocks, but you can also lose a lot of money if you do it haphazardly. Be aware that there is risk in doing any type of investing. There is higher than average risk if you invest in equities ('the stock market'). There is higher risk still, if you pick individual stocks. There is yet even higher risk, if you pick small startup companies.  There are some specific interesting side-elements with your proposal to purchase stock about to have an IPO - those are better dealt with in a separate question if you want more information; search this site for 'IPO' and you should find a good starting point. In short, the company about to go public will hire a firm of analysts who will try to calculate the best price the public will accept for an offering of shares. Stock often goes up after IPO, but not always. Sometimes the company doesn't even fill its full IPO order, adding a new type of risk to a potential investor, that the stock will drop on day 1. Consider an analogy outside the investing world:  Let's say Auto Trader magazine prints an article that says ""all 2015 Honda Civics are worth $15,000 if they have less than 50,000 Miles."" Assume you have no particular knowledge about cars. If you read this article, and you see an ad in the paper the next day for a Honda Civic with 40k miles, should you buy it for $14k? The answer is not without more research. And even if you determine enough about cars to find one for $14k that you can reasonably sell for $15k, there's a whole world of mechanics out there who buy and sell cars for a living, and they have an edge both because they can repair the cars themselves to sell for more, and also because they have experience to spot low-offers faster than you. And if you pick a clunker (or a stock that doesn't perform even when everyone expected it would), then you could lose some serious money. As with buying and selling individual stocks, there is money to be made from car trading, but that money gets made by people who really know what they're doing. People who go in without full information are the ones who lose money in the long run."
The economy would be a lot better if more people had money in their pockets to spend. The only ones with money are the GREEDY CEO and managers. The Rich list this year , the top 100 th wealth grew by £380,000,000,000 ...  I wonder how much better the economy would be better off with some of that money in the workers pockets ?  The only people with a Money Tree are Theresa May, and the rich list. http://i.imgur.com/BGapG2z.jpg I had a pretty good experience with Lending Tree, although they are a mortgage broker, not a lender themselves. "I'd answer it this way:  What do you want to do? I'd say any amount is acceptable from as low as $100.  When you look at the specific ""tree"" of investing paying $5 for a $100 seems unacceptable.  However when observing the ""forest"" what does it matter if you ""waste"" $5 on a commission?  Your friends (and maybe you) probably waste more than $5 multiple times per day.  For them buying a latte might empower them, if buying another share of HD, for a similar cost, empowers you than do it.  In the end who will be better off? Studies show that the more important part of building a significant investment portfolio is actually doing it.  Rate of return and the cost of investing pales in comparison to actually doing it.  How many of your peers are doing similar things?  You are probably in very rare company. If it makes you happy, it is a wonderful way to spend your money." "This is the best tl;dr I could make, [original](http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-40642152) reduced by 45%. (I'm a bot) ***** &gt; Growth in UK house prices has continued to slow, but the cost of the average home still increased by 4.7% in the year to May 2017.  &gt; The main contribution to the rise in house prices came from England, where prices jumped by 5%. The average price of a house in England is now &amp;pound;238,000, the ONS said, while a property in Wales costs &amp;pound;150,000 after a 3.8% increase in prices over the past 12 months.  &gt; Within England, the smallest price rise in the year to May was seen in the North East, up 1.6%, while London had the second lowest price rise of 3%. The highest price rise was 7.5% in the East, just ahead of the East Midlands where property values went up by 7.2%. &amp;quot;Richard Snook, senior economist at business services company PwC, said:&amp;quot;The figures are in line with our expectations that growth in 2017 will be around half that of 2016.   ***** [**Extended Summary**](http://np.reddit.com/r/autotldr/comments/6o284h/house_price_growth_continues_to_slow_in_uk/) | [FAQ](http://np.reddit.com/r/autotldr/comments/31b9fm/faq_autotldr_bot/ ""Version 1.65, ~169772 tl;drs so far."") | [Feedback](http://np.reddit.com/message/compose?to=%23autotldr ""PM's and comments are monitored, constructive feedback is welcome."") | *Top* *keywords*: **price**^#1 **house**^#2 **year**^#3 **rise**^#4 **average**^#5" I am relative newbie in the financial market trading and as I understand it, the response from Victor is accurate in respect of trading CFD contracts. However, there is also the option to 'trade' through a financial spread betting platform which as its name suggests is purely a bet based upon the price of the underlying stock/asset. As such, I believe that your theory to short a stock just prior to its ex-dividend date may be worth investigating further... Apart from that, it's worthwhile mentioning that financial spread betting is officially recognised by HMRC as gambling and therefore not currently [2015/16] subject to capital gains tax. This info is given in good faith and must not be relied upon when making any investment and/or trading decision(s). I hope this helps you make a fortune - if it does; then please remember me! "This is a common and good game-plan to learn valuable life skills and build a supplemental income. Eventually, it could become a primary income, and your strategic risk is overall relatively low. If you are diligent and patient, you are likely to succeed, but at a rate that is so slow that the primary beneficiaries of your efforts may be your children and their children. Which is good! It is a bad gameplan for building an ""empire."" Why? Because you are not the first person in your town with this idea. Probably not even the first person on the block. And among those people, some will be willing to take far more extravagant risks. Some will be better capitalized to begin with. Some will have institutional history with the market along with all the access and insider information that comes with it.  As far as we know, you have none of that. Any market condition that yields a profit for you in this space, will yield a larger one for them. In a downturn, they will be able to absorb larger losses than you. So, if your approach is to build an empire, you need to take on a considerably riskier approach, engage with the market in a more direct and time-consuming way, and be prepared to deal with the consequences if those risks play out the wrong way." "Unfortunately, we don't know your country, but I'd guess ""Not US"" with the hint being your use of the word bugger in a comment.  Realized profits are taxed by all tax authorities I'm aware of, i.e. the Tax Man in every country. Annually, so that you can let the profits run during the year, and offset by the losses during that year.  The exception is within a qualified retirement account. Many countries offer accounts that will let you do just what you're suggesting, start with XXX number of Quatloos in your account, trade for decades, and only take the tax hit on withdrawal. In some cases there's an opportunity to fund the account post tax, and never pay tax again. But to repeat, this is with a retirement account, not the usual trading accounts." Executive Summary: your elevator speech Overview: What it is in detail Disclosure: what can go wrong, in detail subchapter one: internal threats/weakness subchapter two external subchapter three: risk management Proforma financials: heres how much money I need and here's what the books look like at the end of each of five years. Revenue Forecast: how the majic unfolds in units, price, geographically, and any other dimension Corporate/capital structure: how they can get in an out of this investment and other C-suite operating tidbits Execution plan: you receive the money, then what?