Investing & Trading. What’s the difference?

People, including myself, get quite frustrated when they get bombarded with different financial terms and theories. In fact, the frustration is enough to deter some people from the investment world altogether. In this post, I’ll try to explain the difference between two key terms of the investment world. They are, investing and trading.

These two might be dealing with the same financial products but they are actually very different. Different meaning and different techniques employed. Let’s talk in the context of shares/stocks where you’ll have share investors and share traders.

Share investors generally buy shares in order to keep them for the long-term. Usually, investors plan to keep the shares that they own for the long-term of 12 months or more. They do this for the capital growth and for the dividend payments. In other words, they employ the buy and hold strategy. The most famous share investor that I can think of is Warren Buffett.

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Property Investing Seminar

I attended a weekend seminar on the 27th and 28th of October. It was about Property Investing. The seminar ran from 9 am till 5 pm on both days. What happened was, one of the wealth magazines in Australia gathered a number of presenters and each of them gets to talk for 1 hour on a number of topics.

What do I think about the seminar? Well, it wasn’t too bad. Of course, every presenters not only wanted to “present”, but also they wanted to sell their products. Guess how much some of the packages actually cost? One package cost about AUD5000. Yup, 5 big ones.

I learned quite a lot from the seminar. Though there were those few presenters who were the not-so-good presenters and presented some “not-so-good” things. Each talk only touched the surface of the topic but it was actually quite informative. There were two presentations that I really didn’t like. The first one was talking about low-cost housing and another one was talking about renovating your investment properties. The presentation on low-cost housing, was in my opinion, quite misleading. I thought of interjecting, but nah, didn’t want to create a scene. The other guy on renovation, I think more than half of the time, he was talking about some useless things. Instead of talking about renovation, he talked about why is it good to be rich and why we need to be rich. I got quite annoyed with him. I didn’t pay 80 bucks to listen to him rambling about what I already know! Also, there were times when things were becoming a bit redundant. Quite a number of the presenters were talking about the same thing. Same info being repeated over and over again.

However, there were a few that I really enjoyed. They were about property contracts, property options, and the final talk which was about tax.

The cost of attending was AUD80.00. A pretty good investment considering you’re getting all the information under one roof.

The next time these magazines organise these kind of seminars, attend them. 80 bucks is not much to fork out, to get a feel of what’s out there.