Just thought of this as I was tilting to myself when I thought about an investment I made a while back.

Just wondered if any PokerVIP members have dealt with shares and if any were a success/failure?

My story was: Invested in an oil company that my friend had made around £14k from.. He bought at around 250p, they jumped up to 650p and he sold some, then it went down to around 400p and I bought in..

Here comes the horror story, they dropped to 35p.......

I then invested more and the price jumped up slightly, and in the end I sold for around a 1/3 of what I bought in for, total. Couldn't face it as there was so many rumours flying about the company not being able to continue the drills etc, and I'm not even sure if they're still trading..

Any happier stories?

hehe yeh Oil companies can be tricky, I have one now in my portfolio thats loosing a lil bit every day it seems like, just waiting for news pretty much. I dont mind it cause I can buy even more cheaper and I know it has awesome potential being backed by a guy that doest seem to ever fail (Lukas Lundin) and the company is ShaMaran Petroleum Corp. They have there Oil field in Kurdistan though and they are just in the "discovery phase" so this one is super high risk/reward. But I will hold it for a looong time.

But my best one is a company called Starbreeze, I have most % of my money invested there. I managed to "find" them while they were ridic cheap (they still are ridic cheap) and im up around 60% on that one. I pretty much bought it couple days before they released a PM with sales numbers for there big hit game Payday 2 that sold 1.6M copies first month and the market (and me) like that

EDIT: What was the name of that Oil company?

US Oil & Gas - USOP.. So tilting.. They promised such big things, then boom, missed the area when they drilled etc.. not exactly sure, but horrible stuff

Yeh thats the thing with Oil stocks (the ones that are in the discovery phase) if they miss drillings, find less oil then they projected, lesser quility, running out of money, problem getting financed, oil prices going down etc. Yeh tons of variables that makes it super risky, but also fun ;D

The oil stock I own has today gone up 5% just because they relased a PM earlier today that they got a loan for 150M$ that will secure the operations untill 2015 when they are projecting to be ready to start pumping up the oil and get cashflow

If you have any tips in the future, then feel free to post them here and make us ALL money

Hey, I'm interested in getting involved in buying stocks, I don't know the first thing about it though.

Whats the best way to get started?

I got started just by lurking around in investment forums (mostly Swedish ones), and reading allot there, asking lots of questions etc. Reading quarterly reportings from interesting companies is also a good way to learn. Blogs thats about investing (once again, almost only Swedish ones) is highly recommended aswell.. I also try to stick to stocks I either know smth about (like a videogaming stock) or stocks that im willing to learn about (oil stocks etc).

GL, its REALLY fun if you get really in to it!

hehe will do If I had extra money laying around I would SNAP put it into Starbreeze (STAR), extremely undervalued and with next querterly report in the middle of November it could/should (hopefully) gain BIG numbers.

* Disclaimer, all stocks have risks, this particular one probably more risk then others but the potential reward is also WAY higher.

Ok thanks, I'll have a read around and try to learn more about it.

How do I invest in starbreeze? lol

Depends on what bank/broker you use. Problem is this stock isnt listed at the main Swedish/Stockholm exchange but a smaller one for smaller companies, so im not sure if its possible outside Scandinavia. What country do you live in and what bank do you use? And I can look into that for you

Barclays or Halifax and I live in the UK. Thanks buddy!

I used [url]http://www.x-o.co.uk/[/url] when I was investing, its so easy to invest and track etc

I used http://www.x-o.co.uk/ when I was investing, its so easy to invest and track etc
[/quote]

When looking through Bodhisattvas banks; Barclays and Halifax I cant see what stocks they do sell/trade. Can you login to your x-o.co.uk account and search for stock ticker STAR or whole name Starbreeze?

Just one thing from my experience and what I was taught when I was coached by a pro trader...I would avoid the penny stocks, they are penny stocks for a reason and mostly they are quoted on a market where they don`t need to fullfil strict criterias from the stock market authorities (like Pink Sheets in US). What happened to you Ryan is something that is not uncommon, not sure if it was the same case but I will try to explain in short what they are doing: They place a company on the market and they own some stocks by themselves than they try to run the price up with calling people if they want to buy as it is a great opportunity yada yada yada, sending newsletters to mails that this is really a great buy and some people start buying it and pushing the price up, than at some point they sell their amount of stocks (which in most cases is a large number) and the stock price breaks down like a house of cards...Investing in penny stocks is motly like buying a loto ticket where you can hit one that will make you 200,300 or even 1000% but you will lose money on all the others...So IMO it is better to buy the loto ticket every week ;)...2 situations where you can see the risk: 1. I have a friend who bought a company for 10c I think and it run up to 50c or 60c and at the peak he had around 1M worth of stocks I told him be carefull with it as I don`t trust the penny stocks, today it is worth 7c or 8c per share and he wanted to get rid 2 months ago but than the problems started...Interactive brokers want from him some clarification that he is not an insider trader and some other stuff and are blocking the positions till this is resolved, than I tried to help him to get the shares to an European broker but my friends there told me they can not ge tthis stocks as their US broker doesn`t want this stocks in the portfolio as there is a warning issued on this company from the stock exchange regulator, so he can only be happy if he gets his money back at some time....2. In the brokerage where I worked before I had a client who had at least 20 positions of penny stocks as he was only trading them and I remember that his initial buy for all the positions was around 50k at the end it was worth about 8k with several of them being removed with the value 0 as the companies went into bankruptcy....So in short: In my experience in the brokerage company and as a trader I saw many times people buying penny stocks but I remember only one situation where a woman invested 1000 or something like that and had in a short term worth of 20k but I don`t need to say that when she decided to sell it was back down to 7k or something like that...Given the risk to reward ratio I don`t think it is worth and as said would be better to buy a lotery ticket every week ;)...Btw not really a fan of trading on the reports as even in the US where it should be a pretty OK control of this, there are to many false reports given out and it can really hit you in the back but to be honest this comes from a technical analysis trader but it is still the fact about the false reports...I you want to start learning about stock trading I would suggest you to start with the books from William O`Neill...