Your Eircom shares took a battering yesterday. Do you: (a) sell; (b) hold on; (c) extend your share portfolio? These are the questions the dealers and portfolio managers are getting on Goodbody Stockbroker's stand at the Money 2000 show at the RDS in Dublin this weekend. Alternatively, you can go down to the virtual dealing room and try your hand on the virtual dealing floor, guided along by six pit observers from the Trading Places Company.
You'll be trading in virtually-listed companies with the unlikely names of Viagra, IRFU, Manchester United and TV3. News flashes, broadcast regularly, will send shares up or down. But at Money 2000, it's not all stocks and shares. How about holiday or investment homes abroad? Florida Villas Direct is selling three-bed homes with pools 15 minutes from Disney in Florida for £125,000. Ms Sheena Madden from Sunshine Villas Europe is offering apartments from £32,000 up on the costas and Portugal.
So antiques are the new gold? "They have been for many years," corrects Mr Nigel Lees, of Kenulf Fine Arts, based in Stowein-the-Wold in England. "Most of the things sitting on the floor here were priced in hundreds a few years ago; now they're in thousands. So it's a fact, they're an investment."
If you fancy a change of career or a chance of setting up your own business at home, how about franchising? IM Press Promotions is presenting its promotional products' franchising business in Ireland this weekend.
"We don't have minimum quantities so we can sell small quantities and open up the market for fund-raising, clubs, organisations, societies. And we have unique products," says Mr Doug Wilkie.
You get everything from the product to the design, the press and computers. They get £30,000 for each franchise.
Ms Maura Byrne, Money 2000 organiser, says thousands of people from young whizzkids to elderly people attend the show. A series of day-long seminars on all types of investments runs alongside the exhibition today and tomorrow from 11 a.m. to 6.30 p.m.
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