Trading with Focus – Being on the wrong side of a trade

We start this week with a BNPL hypothetical: With Zip Co (ASX:Z1P) currently trading around $6, a Primary School teacher (who bought ZipCo at $2), a Theoretical Physicist (who bought ZipCo at $7) and Killface (pictured; from the best TV show you’ve never seen) walk into a bar. Who is the winner?

Have you heard this one before? No? OK, strap in kids.

The first part of this story requires definition of the terms, then, we find out how they all got here and why I am telling this story.

Winning.

It means different things to different people. Charlie Sheen was born into acting, as the son of Robert Duvall (and brother of Martin Sheen) he already had a leg up (don’t believe everything you read). The young Charles didn’t care for acting as much as he cared about partying, so the success in acting was a means to his own set of ends, so he believes he is winning – remember? That whole thing?

Whereas, it would be easy to argue that someone like Tom Hanks would gauge his own personal success on the quality of his acting, not by the thickness of the callouses on his septum. And puts in the effort to hone his craft.

So, the key takeaway here is that there are different types of winning, depending on your goals and needs.

The Primary School Teacher (who bought ZipCo at $2).

Larry is quite pleased right now. But this whole Covid mess has been very worrying, especially when the schools started shutting down.

Forced to go online to teach the young’ns, Larry was digging around at Paddy Pallin’s website for a new sleeveless hiking vest during virtual-recess when he came across a new payment option that suited his sensible spending habits.

After school that fateful day in early April, whilst accompanying the cat on a short walk around the various ferns in his flat, Larry considered the idea that “maybe a lot of people were buying online now. And couldn’t go out to shop either. And had time on their hands. And would notice the ads from Zip-pay and the like.”

The cat had no response, as was the cat’s way more and more these days.

Logging in again, he considered buying some shares in the company. “They <shares> were all down weren’t they, and what goes down must come up, right?” Once again there was no response from the cat, as it once again tried to lick the back of its own head.

How many shares in Zippy should he buy? Would this be the only time he bought shares? Would he become a daytrader? No. Larry had a job and he liked it. So Larry bought his $1000 worth of Zip-pay shares on the cheapest platform he could find. And it only cost him $9.50. Perfect, and no commitment (also perfect).

Purchased: $1,000 plus $9.50 brokerage.

Value @ $6: $3,000

Net profit: $2,000 minus $9.50

Larry is rapt. Larry cares about his students, not the market depth. Larry rings his Mum regularly and doesn’t have time to read the latest news from ZipCo as it comes out, or the desire.

Larry is using the right share platform for him as he rarely trades and will probably use any wins from Z1P to take a seaside holiday when all this is over, or maybe he’ll just hang onto them and see what happens, like an exciting little experiment. Neato!

Larry is winning.

If only the cat would stop acting so shifty all the time.

Theoretical Physicist (who bought ZipCo at $7)

Kent saw this all coming. The math never lies. Too many people, too long since a pandemic, cycles within cycles and pangolins and bats and Obama taunting Donald meant that the Karens would thrive. But, they didn’t listen did they!

It doesn’t matter now, Kent is on JobKeeper and at home. His lab was investigating the destructive effects of global warming and because no-one cares about any of that now, they got sent home. Those virus guys and their special travel privileges think they are sooo smart still getting to use the lab, but that’s fine, Kent is also a share-trader. And he’s good.

Trading shares is research and maths and patterns and psychology all rolled into one. And when you get it right, you’re rewarded with cash and that general all over warm (smug) feeling of knowing that you are smart! (and possibly lucky a fair bit of the time too; also fine.)

So during lockdown Kent stepped up his trading game. He subscribed to the first new proper professional-grade trading platform he’d seen in years, and as a bonus it also offered the lowest rates of brokerage. Science!

Having traded with one of the big banks for years, he despised paying ‘those fatcats’ $30 a trade for the $20,000 parcels he regularly traded.

In 2018/19, Kent made about 4 trades a week, so his brokerage was about $6,000 a year. But this year he doubled down, and was slinging intraday trades like a demon. He was trading a few times a day, and at this stage he was looking down the barrel of $3,000 of brokerage a month!

So by shifting to Marketech, his subscription fell to a simple $45 a month. But now he didn’t need that extra charting package he was paying extra for either (because it was included in the Marketech service). AND the brokerage was down from $3,000 a month to $500.

Kent was still living large from that knock-off patent he sold to those Belarussian schmucks in 2012. But even as a somewhat financially-comfortable guy, if he saw two and a half grand on the floor he would still pick it up.

The account-opening process took 6 minutes, so ‘twas time well spent for His Kent-ness (as he called himself online).

Kent bought a few Z1P at $7, but as a general rule he trades in and out of stocks pretty regularly. With the recent bullmarket — and the bags he has made on silver stocks — Kent’s gains have dwarfed the losses he is holding on Z1P (which was more of an ‘experimental’ trade than anything, just to see if the number of Facebook posts was correlated with a rally).

“More and more of the trading opportunities at the moment are about being on the opposite side”, he ruminated.

Kent is also saving almost $2,500 this month alone just on brokerage by shifting to Marketech Focus, so the coupla grand he is down on Z1P isn’t worth worrying about.

There are still pangolins running around in the wild after all. And he gets the technical charts, alerts and live pricing that cost extra elsewhere – and placing trades is quick! Even if he was only trading a small handful of times, it’s still cheaper than the big bank combo.

And all this extra money lets Kent work on his pet project — that pesky cure for global warming.

Kent is also winning.

Killface (pictured, from the best TV show you’ve never seen, Frisky Dingo)

If you have ever seen Archer (another TV show) you would love Frisky Dingo. Same sense of humour, great delivery and timing and a story line that just gets better and better. I mean, more and more twisted.

So, Xander Crews (who is a billionaire playboy and also a sort-of superhero) has beaten all the bad-guys with the help of his robot fighting team – the Xtacles – and tries to trick chief bad-guy Killface into signing a contract to allow him to sell action figures using him as the bad guy.

Anyways…Killface for some reason is trying to blow the Earth into the Sun, but no-one seems to believe him.

A very, very convoluted story later, Killface’s proprietary doom machine – the Annihalatrix – malfunctions and ends up pushing the Earth exactly 1 metre away from the Sun, thereby curing global warming.

He accidentally won the thing he wasn’t meaning to win. Not a Larry and certainly not a Kent, this guy is something else altogether (almost completely unrelated to this whole story, one wonders…).

It is such an amazing and hilarious story, and almost impossible to believe that any of it could happen, But then again, you’re still not trading with Marketech Focus and Donald is still in the White House so maybe anything is possible in this crazy world.

So to summarise, Killface accidentally cured global warming without meaning to, which Kent wanted to do. Larry is just a good allround guy and doesn’t judge himself on share market returns, and now he’s got a snappy sweater vest from Paddy Pallin’s.

But Kent is a serious trader and is saving money on trades whilst getting all sorts of cool stuff that his previous trading platform didn’t have.

So who wins?

Well, they all do in their own way. But we award the prize – and this is a promo for Marketech Focus after all!

Larry didn’t need anything more than the name of the company, the knowledge it was down and the view it would probably go up. And a clock is right twice a day, so why not?

Killface just did what’s called ‘failing upwards’, and although the outcome was great, it wasn’t what he meant to do. Like accidentally buying the wrong company in March and still making money… (You think that’s an urban myth? It’s not. I know the guy…)

But we built Marketech Focus for Kent*, or for anyone that is an active, regular or serious trader. Whether you want technical charts, a mobile platform with all the features, live prices and/or alerts — if you are serious about the market, Marketech Focus is for you.

There’s still too many ‘lifestyle’ trading apps out there with pretty pictures or flashing lights instead of useful market detail designed to make the Larrys think they are Kents, when really they are very sub-Kent (or hypo-Kent) when it comes to trading.

(*in hindsight I should have given Kent a snappier name, like Blaze, or Draco. but we are the best at trading platform development — not making up names for advertorials in Stockhead).

And it is great. Cheaper, better, faster, more mobile. So Kent, the Theoretical Physicist that bought Z1P at $7, wins it all, shouts the pub and pulls Sally the wannabe actress that sometimes works behind the bar.

You, on the other hand, are still trying to figure out what the Z1P price even is because you’re always at least a few steps behind with whatever platforms you’re currently using.

Because you are stuck in the sub-Kent range.

But we can fix that.

The End.

Hang on, weren’t they all walking into a bar?

Trade Up to Marketech Focus — a high-function trading platform from $45 per month. Instant trading capability for both PC and mobile to keep you on the move.

As a subscriber you will have access to brokerage starting at $5, and then 0.02 per cent for trades over $25k. Go to www.marketech.com.au to set up a free trial.

This article was developed in collaboration with Marketech Stockbroking Pty Ltd (AFSL 486148), a Stockhead advertiser at the time of publishing. This article does not constitute financial product advice. You should consider obtaining independent advice before making any financial decisions.