{"id":17036,"date":"2010-12-19T04:39:55","date_gmt":"2010-12-19T09:39:55","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/countingpips.com\/fx\/?p=17036"},"modified":"2010-12-19T04:39:55","modified_gmt":"2010-12-19T09:39:55","slug":"share-investing-why-is-it-so-common-for-people-to-lose-money","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.investmacro.com\/fx\/2010\/12\/19\/share-investing-why-is-it-so-common-for-people-to-lose-money\/","title":{"rendered":"Share Investing &#8211; Why Is It So Common For People To Lose Money?"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>By James Woolley<\/p>\n<p>The thing about stock market investing is that anyone with some spare  capital can play the markets. That means that the markets consist of  both highly skilled investors and people with no investing experience at  all. The trouble is that a lot of these inexperienced investors will  end up losing money very easily.<\/p>\n<p>There are various mistakes that  these people make. The first is that they will often have no type of  strategy in place to begin with. It&#8217;s all well and good getting  investing tips from the various stock market-related forums and picking  up tips from newspapers and investing magazines, but this is a dangerous  strategy and can easily lead to losses.<\/p>\n<p>So many of these  so-called experts give out bad advice all the time, which is why they  are journalists and not seriously wealthy investors, and a lot of the  people on the forums are not much better either. In fact some of them  only go on these forums to ramp up their own stocks, and encourage  others to buy them so the share price rises as a result.<\/p>\n<p>Another  reason why so many people lose money is because they do not have a  well-diversified portfolio. It can sometimes be very tempting to plough  all of your money into one or two stocks, and while you may make huge  returns, you can also lose most of your capital if you&#8217;re not careful.  In fact you could lose absolutely everything if your chosen companies go  bust. This can easily happen if you invest primarily in smaller cap  stocks, which is another mistake that a lot of investors make.<\/p>\n<p>Finally  even if you do have a well-diversified portfolio, you can still end up  losing a lot of money if you don&#8217;t apply a solid stop loss strategy.  Some people absolutely refuse to admit defeat when the share price keeps  on falling, and end up racking up huge losses as a result. So if you  cut your losing trades early, you can keep your losses to a minimum and  help to avoid any major blowouts.<\/p>\n<p>A similar rule applies to  winning trades as well. So many people like to bank profits as soon as  they are there, but if you keep on taking profits in the region of 5%  and use a stop loss of 10%, for example, then you are sure to end up  losing money in the long run.<\/p>\n<p>Stock market investing is far from  easily, and it&#8217;s very common for people to lose money, particularly when  the wider stock market falls. However if you manage your capital wisely  and maintain a well-diversified portfolio, then there is no reason why  anyone cannot make money from investing, regardless of their previous  experience.<\/p>\n<h3>About the Author<\/h3>\n<p>Click here to read a review of <a href=\"http:\/\/theforexarticles.com\/tradeking-review\/\" target=\"_new\">TradeKing<\/a>, the online discount broker, and to read a full <a href=\"http:\/\/theforexarticles.com\/zecco-review\/\" target=\"_new\">Zecco review<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The thing about stock market investing is that anyone with some spare capital can play the markets. That means that the markets consist of both highly skilled investors and people with no investing experience at all.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-17036","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.investmacro.com\/fx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17036","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.investmacro.com\/fx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.investmacro.com\/fx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.investmacro.com\/fx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.investmacro.com\/fx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=17036"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.investmacro.com\/fx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17036\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.investmacro.com\/fx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=17036"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.investmacro.com\/fx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=17036"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.investmacro.com\/fx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=17036"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}