FYI | Jun 29 2006
Reader John Bedson sent us the following email this morning:
The dangers or perhaps the advantages of buying shares online may be demonstrated by something that happened to me yesterday.
I was considering buying 750 SUN (Suncorp-Metway) shares and I had put the passwords and username into my online brokerage service and brought up the "Buy" panel without inserting the volume or price fields. However I was looking at the performance of QBE, PMN and IAG and this caused me to change my mind and think that perhaps the insurance exposure of SUN would limit their gain. I was just about to press "cancel" on the panel when the wife came in with a vacuum hose fitted with the soft brush. "Oh just look at your desk, it’s covered in dust" she exclaimed and started running the brush over my desk, telephone, fax machine, computer keyboard and everything else. I walked out of the room to make a coffee while she did this.
To my horror, when I returned I discovered that as Allison cleaned the keyboard with the vacuum, not only had she put "Caps Lock" "Num Lock" on and also started "Microsoft Word", but my online portfolio was recording a new purchase of 5,000 SUN shares at a total at market cost price of $94,750.00 that had been made during the time that my wife had been cleaning my desk and I had been making a cup of coffee!
The price was rising at the time so I left things as they were and sold the 5,000 SUN shares after lunch when they were ten cents higher and made $500.00 profit, less brokerage charges.
I’m not sure what the moral of this story is. In the future, should I close down my computer before letting the wife vacuum? But if I had done that I would have lost $500.00. Or do I have to face the awful truth that our vacuum cleaner might be better at picking stocks than I am?
And before you ask – no, I’m not willing to sell the vacuum to you. I’m going to experiment with it on WOW and MIG today, to see just how good it is!
John Bedson’s commentary and predictions on Australian stock market action are available subscription free at: http://www.australianinvestmentguide.com/