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LONDON (Reuters) - Last week’s frenzied battle over GameStop that pitted retail traders against Wall Street hedge funds joins a long line of tussles between investors going ‘long’ by buying shares and those seeking to turn a profit from ‘short’ trades.
FILE PHOTO: The GameStop store sign is seen at its shop in Westminster, Colorado January 14, 2014. REUTERS/Rick Wilking
Short trading involves borrowing shares and selling them on with the aim of buying them back later more cheaply and pocketing the difference. But it can be a risky bet.
Markets can go the wrong way and losses can be crushing if a stock climbs, forcing short-sellers to scramble to buy back shares so they can close their positions.
Image source: Getty Images.
Currently, the
FTSE 100 index is enjoying its best-ever start to January since it launched in 1984. On Thursday, the Footsie closed at 6,857, up almost 400 points (6.1%) in four trading days. Alas, the index didn’t have a great 2020, diving almost 1,100 points down a seventh (14.3%). However, the share performances of individual Footsie members were very widely dispersed last year. Let’s find out more about the best shares to buy (and the worst) from the FTSE 100 12 months ago.
2020’s winners and losers
Get ready for a surprise. Though the FTSE 100 dived in 2020, half (50) of the index’s 100 shares actually rose in value over 12 months. These gainers recorded rises ranging from a tiny 0.1% to a whopping 113.4%. The mean average gain across all 50 risers was just over a quarter (26.6%). If your portfolio consisted only of these 50 stocks, I applaud you for finding the best shares to buy.
Image source: The Motley Fool
Countries around the world had different responses to the 2020 pandemic. In Canada, there was a swift response by the federal government to prevent the spread of the coronavirus and mitigate its impact on the economy. In the stock market, investors looked to Warren Buffett for guidance.
The legendary investor said about COVID-19, “We haven’t faced this exact problem, but we’ve faced tougher problems.” Still, Buffett was also blind-sided when the pandemic struck. His first response was dump stocks in pandemic-stricken industries.
With the lockdown affecting the restaurant business, Buffett’s
Berkshire Hathaway sold its entire stock holdings in
How a millennial s $57,700 charity lunch with Bill Ackman turned into a $46.5 million IPO Julia La Roche
In 2018, entrepreneur-turned-investor Andrew Wilkinson, who runs Victoria, Canada-based tech holding company Tiny, shelled out $57,700 for a charity auction lunch with Bill Ackman, the well-known billionaire activist investor and CEO of Pershing Square Capital Management.
The $57,700 lunch turned out to be an excellent investment that led to a friendship and, ultimately, a business partnership. Ackman s family office invested in one of Wilkinson s portfolio companies, WeCommerce, marking the young investor s first time accepting outside capital.
This month, WeCommerce, a holding company of software and digital service brands in the Shopify (SHOP) ecosystem such as Pixel Union, Out of the Sandbox, Yopify, SuppleApps, Rehash and Foursixty made its public debut on the TSX Venture Exchange, raising CAD$60 million in the process.
Capitalism forward
By Bill Sims Contributing columnist
The great Greek biographer and philosopher Plutarch, wrote that “The imbalance between rich and poor is the oldest and most fatal ailment of all republics.” Perhaps an argument could be made that much of the social and economic tension in America today is a reflection of the increase in income and wealth disparity in our nation.
To be clear about the difference in these two factors, income inequality is a measure of how unevenly income exists in the nation, whereas wealth inequality is the uneven distribution of overall wealth or net worth. While income inequality has increased steadily in America, wealth inequality has increased dramatically.