Category: Finance

Amazingly enough my losses on the stocks have dropped from $7 to just $4. In fact:

In other news, I have another bet going on on a horse, following a hot tip. I’ve got £1 each way on Brilliant Light at Meydan 16.15.

Update: It came in! My £2.00 bet resulted in a return of £2.50. I can’t retire just yet.

Apart from investing a bit of cash with the Nat West online investments easy-to-use thing I’ve never played around with the stock exchange. So today I changed that.

I’ve invested £145 ($200) using the app ‘eTorro’, mainly because I fancied seeing what cryptocurrencies actually do. Thus far it’s been a wild ride. I bought $25 of shares in BitCoin (BTC), and $25 of shares in ZCash (ZEC). Then I pressed the wrong button and accidentally bought $50 of shares in Apple.

This was half an hour ago. So far I seem to have lost $1.37. Updates to follow as I learn more about the share trading ability.

I’ve placed one or two small bets in the past but never had the understanding or confidence to continue. Or interest in learning for that matter. A couple of notable instances spring to mind:

• Going to York Races with a friend. Placing £5 bets on each of the six races as each was run, and losing on every one, except for the last, which returned enough money to make up my losses, pay for the entry fee to the races, pay for all the drinks I had had, and still walk away with a profit. Purely random luck.
• Placing a bet online on the outcome of the 2016 Brexit Referendum. I was convinced we would all sensibly vote to remain and had an email fro a well-known betting company to offer good odds if I wanted to make a bet. So I thought that would be amusing. I opened an account, placed £10 on us remaining, forgot about it and went to bed. In the morning I woke to the strangest story that we had a majority for ‘leave’. I checked on my betting account and it turned out that I had pressed the wrong button and accidentally put my £10 on leave instead of remain. I got £60 back. Every cloud etc…

Anyway, this weekend another friend of mine gave me a tip on a horse in a Newmarket race at 15:35. I thought that this would be a good opportunity to learn how to do this sort of stuff so I opens an account with William Hill and deposited a fiver, and placed £2 of it on the tip. It came in and I won £15.

Looking into it further it seems I am able to place bets on the outcome of eSports, virtual races, TV shows an politics, as well as all the boring stuff around football, racing and other sports. I could get into this. Will report back in due course.