The Naked Trader Thread

Hello and welcome to this new discussion forum! My name is Robbie Burns - I've been an investor for many years and have made money every year. My website is updated daily at www.nakedtrader.co.uk.

And I write the DIY Pension column for the Sunday Times, which charts the buys and sells for my SIPP.

I worked as a finance editor for Sky TV from 1996 before leaving to be an investor/trader in 2001.

I'd like to point out that I am not a tipster or a "guru" - I am just an ordinary bloke making money from trading/investing. I've done well, but still make mistakes - don't expect me to know the answers to everything or always get everything right. However I would like to share my many years of experience of buying and selling shares with you all. I hope above all newer investors will learn from the mistakes I (hopefully) used to make.

I thought it would be a great idea to have a general and hopefully interesting general discussion forum that will end up helping us all. I will contribute as much as I can though I can't promise to do it every day - especially as a baby is due! However I will try and take part at much as I can.

So what is this thread all about? I'm looking for fun but sensible discussions based around these sorts of topics:

• smaller (but not too small) growth companies, and FTSE 250
• ideas for shorting (especially FTSE 100)
• charting and technical analysis
• Spread betting, cfd's and covered warrants
• market makers and their ways
• level 2
• use of stop losses
• stockbrokers and spread firms - your thoughts
• why and how various shares are moving
• what you bought and sold but with genuine and well-researched reasoning
• Your mistakes - and how you learned from them
• ideas and helpful advice for new investors
• software, the good and bad
• and any ideas to help us all to improve our trading
• your horror stories - and successes

What I want to avoid:

• Discussions on AIM or any share with a market cap of less than £25m. There are zillions of threads/discussions on tiny companies so let's stick to liquid companies.
• "Buy blah, it's gonna fly" "20 bagger" type entries - you know what I mean
• Promotions for tipping services, etc
• Nasty comments - let's be civilised.
• tipsters and gurus
• attacks on other people
• "jokes"

I really hope this thread will build into a useful resource for us all and we can all help each other to make money (that's what it's all about!). I hope it will evolve and develop over the months ahead.

I thought to kick off this new discussion group I'd mention a few topics we could start discussing…these are some of the ones discussed on my website recently.

Market-makers - how can you tell when a share's going down whether it's a tree-shake or not?

When buying a share is it best to use spread betting to do it or buy in the normal way?

Level 2 is a mystery, especially SETS. Is it any use?

My spreadfirm stopped me out of a position just because the share's spread widened for a few seconds, is that fair and which firms are worst for this?

CFD's - can anyone explain them!

PE ratios - every publications seems to quote different figures, who has the right one?

So there you are, it's over to you. The best poster in the first week gets a free subscription to the ADVFN premium bulletin board for one year courtesy of ADVFN.