a few lessons from today: don't buy stuff "at market" no matter how keen you are to get it; the price can jump quite a lot and you end up being the bunny who buys at the peak.

check the previous day's close before setting a price.

and if you act on an announcement, you have mere minutes. half an hour is too long.

What happened? I don't want to talk about it...maybe later.

although it seemed like forever, it took three weeks to make that $300 on bgf. which is my target of $100 a week to pay the mortgage whence the funds I'm playing with are drawn. so if BTA doesn't dive on me, I might be OK. have run across a problem in the form of capital works needed on the said mortgaged property, but they can be deferred somewhat. I don't expect this market to last forever; a year of playing might be good, then I'll pull my head in.

hooray. computershare sold my shares at only 4 cents below the peak. so after all that bullshit, I haven't lost money; the extra $400 will cover the double brokerage fee and the extra I paid to rebuy the shares to honour the sale I tried to make at the start of the month.

now off to purchase a quarter of the shares I started with...

at last, some action: BGF, my first purchase, finally hit .44 and the sale went through the moment the auction opened this morning. Meaning I have my $10,000 back and a profit of (sound of pen scratching on paper), $295, after allowing $50 brokerage. yee-hah.

meanwhile also, my ex-employer's shares have gone up ten percent. as the evil Computershare has forced me to sell them via their system, which involves posting an order in the MAIL, I have no idea whether I caught the peak or not - all $400 of it. must call them today.

now at least I can afford to buy back the $1000 worth of their shares I wanted to get.

I won't dive into another daytrading purchase until I sell either the $10,000 of bta shares I have (which are not going anywhere right now) or the $5000 of vba.

Computershare won: I am just going to sell my shares through them as even with brokerage etc, it's cheaper to sell them all and rebuy via Comsec than do the stupid complex transfer. not that selling is that simple.

my parcel of shares went down $22 today; down about $150 all up since I started trying to sell them. sigh.

there are no words for the level of red tape and incompetence I'm encountering at Computershare as I try to get my ex-employer's shares transferred out of trust.

first there was a nightmare of getting my ex-employer to actually notify Computershare that I'd left, freeing up the shares I bought in a company employee plan to be sold. that was the easy bit, it seems.

Friday 13th: ring and request form to be emailed.

Tuesday 17th: ring again and make a fuss. Form arrives and is faxed and posted back to me. notice they mention a "transfer fee" and suspect it will be outrageous.

Days pass.

Tuesday 25th: ring again, to be told there is no record of form arriving. am asked have I sent the fee? no I haven't because I don't know what it is. Insist on getting more information: apparently once they find my form (if ever!), they'll write to me (2-3 days is my guess, but going on performance it might be a week) asking for $110. Then, when I've sent it, they'll bank the cheque and - this is where it gets stupid - they'll "send paperwork" to my ex-employer to be approved. again. I question this. I ask what paperwork exactly. the call centre person can't answer me. I say it could take days, weeks to get that back from my employer. and even when they do, and once they free them up, I have to get comsec to transfer the shares into my account before I can sell them. I could sell them through Computershare, but hell will freeze over before I deliver them any of my money; besides, I'm going to keep some of them.

now awaiting an email from an actual human, with a name, so I can try to sort this out.

meanwhile, Comsec tell me that the shares won't transfer anyway because of extremely minor differences in the name and address under which the shares are held and my Comsec account name. so I have to change that as well.possibly I would do better to just sell them and rebuy; that's not an option for my ex-employer's shares due to the Computershare profit thing, but it is for some others I just own outright through anothe broker.


I've lost count of the number of steps involved in doing this. too fucking many, that's for sure. meanwhile, share price drops gently like a feather in the wind...

yes yes yes. I mean no, nothing's happened yet. but it will.

meanwhile, possibly out of sheer boredom, I'm going to put another $5000 into Virgin Blue and see if I can make $100. big risk for small returns. I'm sure Warren Buffett wouldn't approve.

did you know that the ASX brings its trading system online alphabetically? so even if the market opens at 10, VBA won't trade until ten past?

still waiting for BTA and BGF to get their act together; it will take a while, but I'm fairly confident they'll both reach their targets. just not as fast as I'd have liked.

meanwhile, another of my potential targets, ADA, has had a huge run - up from 46 cents last week to 54 cents today. I bought $750 worth on Tuesday for my "hold" portfolio, so I made a few dollars on it this week - not as much as I lost on Toll, which I sold out of yesterday, but them's the breaks. TOL has dropped again today, so I feel I made the right decision there.

starting to look into the detailed research - the profits, the announcements. ADA, strangely enough, started to rise (or at least come back - it was a dotcom bubble stock once upon a time) after the chairman of the board gave it a "not good enough" rating last December.

not having set a proper stop-loss figure, I am now paralysed by the sight of my shares dropping up to six per cent - that's six hundred dollars. do I get out? is this the crash? or am I simply condemned to a long, slow wait for them to crawl back up again? if I sell, it will take a lot of successful trades to make it up.

also, memo to self: never take stock tips from brother again. I bought a few Toll holdings shares. then Toll's courier arm were responsible for a delivery to my home, which was a pain in the ass to organise. then the shares dropped nine percent. I plan to sell them as soon as they regain their old level. if they don't, I plan to keep them as a kind of living reminder of the horrors of the stock market.

so close...both my stocks came to within a cent of the target prices today, but didn't make it to the sell point.

Computershare has managed to go two business days without sending an email they promised me; I cannot wait to get my shares out of there. did I mention that their poorly worded statements led me to believe I could sell shares from my former employer, but in fact I couldn't? I think I did...

and I've sent off the info to get my cheaper trading account. I also have to tx a few shares out of my husband's name and into mine, as part of a cleanup/rationalisation program.

looking at: Zinifex and a few others. and looking forward to splitting the 20,000 into three parcels in the hope that will give me more action on a day-to-day basis.

an exciting, yet fruitless couple of days; I still have $20,000 sitting in BTA and BGF, which stubbornly refused to move yesterday despite gold going even higher. both came within a cent of my sell price, though, so I think it'll be OK.

this is all teaching me a little more caution; the new strategy will be to have three lots of money out at once. two will be on a "sell at 2.5% profit" basis, to keep grabbing those small rises in the ups and downs of the market. when I have my new trading account, each deal will only cost $40, so it's doable with around $7000 per parcel. A third will be, at least until I get more nervous, on a sell-when-ready basis, when I think a stock's going to move more than three per cent in a short period.

so I've downgraded what I think I can make, but it's still more than the interest on the money in the bank.

meanwhile, I've learned what happens when you sell shares you don't have. the broker rings you in a panic. my employee share plan shares, despite being labelled "unrestricted" on the statements, and despite my having a SRN (ownership number), were actually in some obscure Computershare trust which I need to transfer them out of. hence today I was forced to buy 500 of them at five cents more than I originally sold them for, to honour the deal. Comsec kindly waived brokerage on that deal, and I seem to be spending my entire life trying to get my ex-employer to notify the trust that I've left the company, and to get the form that will allow me to get the shares out of trust. yes, they can email me the form. but they have to get someone in Sydney to do that. so it can take up to 48 hours. welcome to the world of instant electronic communications!

then, of course, I'll have to sell the original parcel of 500 shares again. hoping the stock keeps going up a little so I don't lose even more on this schemozzle.

running total at this point: lots of brokerage fees. some paper gains on my small "hold" portfolio. no big fat profits. yet.

ah what the hell. this blog ain't call day trade madness for nothing.

I've put in another telephone order for $10,000 worth of Biota shares, and a sell order at 2.5 per cent above what I paid for them. of course as they went up six per cent today they won't move for a while. but clearly if it takes a week to buy, sell and clear each trade, I need more than one lot of $10,000 in the market.

meanwhile, when I get my other shares cleared into CHESS, I'll be able to dispense with the stupid and expensive phone orders. I may still set up the special trading account that has the same effect, in order to get cheaper trades, but I'm still waiting on the documentation on that to come in the snail mail.

so I've got $20,000 sitting in the market now. wheee!

my 23,000 BGF shares are bobbing along just below the surface at about 1.5 per cent less than what I paid for them. Meanwhile, the alternative buy, Biota, has jumped yet another five percent after a twelve percent rise on Monday. the bird flu thing must be really scaring people; Biota makes a flu vaccine.

There is nothing I can do about this situation; I could of course pull another ten thousand out of my mortgage and chase my losses. But it's a little early in the game for that as yet. All I can do is wait for the BGF shares to bob up again to my sell level just over 2 per cent higher than I paid for them, and then see what's next. I'm certainly downgrading my estimate of how fast I can pay back my original 10,000. But as long as I'm making more than seven per cent a year - and the market overall is doing that right now - I'm OK. And even if I only make enough to make my mortgage and costs payments - about $100 a week, roughly 50 per cent profit a year - hell, that's pretty good, isn't it?

I think I need to make some of these purchases in the larger stocks, which I have a higher bank limit on, if only for speed and convenience, and to reduce the heart-in-the-mouth factor.

Meanwhile, I'm in the process of transferring some other shares to my Commonwealth account in order to bump up that limit on what I can buy.

hehe. ten minutes later, I've lost money. this is going well...

red tape

17 minutes and 19 seconds on the phone to Commsec later, I have my shares, and some information: they place limits on trades, even if you have the money in your account. and of course my trade was over that limit. so I had to do it on the phone, paying $54 instead of $30 for the purchase. I can open a new special trading account, for which I now have the forms. But there is still a limit, and the issue that it takes three days for funds to settle - more like four for earnings, too.

I suppose there is some nifty software somewhere that will do all this for me. But for the moment, I think I'll just go slowly, as long as the trend is upwards. at least I can sell as much as I like online.

one more thing for today: to subscribe to the Commsec IPO newsletter. the hardest thing will be finding a new stock every time I sit down to do this, which I thought would be every day but now looks like every 3-4 days.

OK, here we go.

Trade#1 is BGF, Ballarat Gold Fields. It's at a record high, but that's because the price of gold is up and the mine is about to go into production. It went up five percent or so yesterday (remember, don't rely on my figures, they're rough). So if I go for just a two percent rise, plus the cost of my trades ($60 a time to get in and out), that would be a good start.

It closed at .425 yesterday. If I can get it for about that today, I need around 23,000 shares ($9775). If I then sell at .440, that's $10,120. That's up $345, leaving a profit of $280.

This is all of course what I want to happen. In practice, the shares could dive and I could do my money. Exciting, isn't it?

do I know what I'm doing?

So, you're probably wondering: this girl, has she got any idea? In short, no.

But a newspaper here recently took eight sets of stock tips from experts, an astrologer, a schoolchild and a dartboard - yes, a dartboard - and guess who won? The dartboard. If I had a monkey, I'd let it pick my stocks. Actually, one day I might let my two-year-old son have a go. Just watch me.

These are my starting rules: I'll probably add more.

1) Big trades. $5,000 minimum. Any less and I lose too much in brokerage - $30 to buy, $30 to sell.

2) When I reach my target, get out. If I've set a $300 profit target for a particular trade, I sell then. And no whingeing later about how I could have made $500. The point is to make a little bit every day, not somehow double my money in a day (though that would be nice).

3) Play percentages. Who cares if a stock only goes up ten cents: if it started at two dollars, that's a great return.

4) Floss.

Madness, fever, complete insanity, whatever...

Well, I really wanted to call this blog Day Trade Fever, but hey, all the good names are gone.

So here I am, unemployed, with a bit of money from a redundancy payout. I could put it on the mortgage and save myself seven percent a year - sensible but boring. I could blow it all on art - fun, but not really wise. I could put it in the bank - even more boring. I could go to the casino and put it all on 28 - possibly highly lucrative, most likely a short thrill followed by years of kicking myself in the backside (ouch!)

Today I bought a few shares. No big deal there, but for the first time, I looked really hard at what's available online, even just through my bank's trading interface. I also noticed that two of the shares I bought jumped between seven and 12 percent. In a single day.

I have no trading expertise. I have never read anything by Warren Buffett. I have no special trading software. But I have a plan, an Internet connection, and $10,000.

So here goes. Stick with me: I'll post my strategy, my thoughts, my buys, sells, losses and a running total, more or less. Short-term, the goal is to repay my $10,000 into the mortgage: then, it's to infinity and beyond!