Short-selling and options trading have been in the news over the past few weeks, with stories of everyday investors making fortunes, but what do these terms mean, and should we be doing this ourselves? In this week’s episode, we talk about some alternative investments, and the potential calamitous damage they could pose to the life savings of an unprepared investor. We also have a chat about investing outside your home country, to access potential higher growth opportunities.
- Are penny stocks a way to get rich by investing in small companies destined for bigger things, or are they a trap for your hard-earned investment dollars?
- Trading on margin allows you to invest more money than you have to achieve higher returns, but it also means you can lose more too – potentially everything
- Shorting a stock allows you to make money from a stock price going down, but you might get painfully squeezed if your bet goes wrong and the stock goes up instead
- With Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies reaching new highs over the past few months, should they form a part of your investment portfolio?
- Trading in options is another way to use leverage to supercharge your investment gains or to manage volatility, but unless you know your puts from your calls, they can just as easily wreck your returns
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