Stock market dealing

[foxhole]

My investment is still in the black despite one heavy looser but looking at the long term so not worried yet .

 

[JohnD]

My investment is still in the black despite one heavy looser but looking at the long term so not worried yet .

Good to hear it.

As an investor, you should be looking at the 12-month return, and longer.

Mine are more than satisfactory.

I have been thinning out the International ones that are too dependent on Trumpland, and will dump the remainder. The combination of lacklustre performance and the incredible shrinking dollar show no sign of changing. I also gauge the US tech sector to be overbought and risky.

 

[Justin Passing]

As an investor, you should be looking at the 12-month return, and longer.

Why not 8 months or 2 years?
I depends on what happens, not on a calendar.

I have been thinning out the International ones that are too dependent on Trumpland, and will dump the remainder. The combination of lacklustre performance and the incredible shrinking dollar show no sign of changing. I also gauge the US tech sector to be overbought and risky.

That IS reacting to what happens, and what seems likely to continue - perfectly sensible. Using "Should" and a pre-specified time period has no particular merit. You can try to use things which you judge are likely to behave in a certain way.

My investment is still in the black despite one heavy looser but looking at the long term so not worried yet .

A way to stop one thing dominating suddenly is to "DCA in", as stated above.

There really is a long term shortage of silver, so eventually it is likely to recover its price. Gold is tending to replace the greenback as a reliable long term holding, but that will change over time. Gold is actually not a very useful or very rare asset and has no "yield", so one could use tulips, or crypto currency. The tradition is so much stronger though.


The SM behaviour is getting to look more and more like what happened in the dot com bubble. There are key differences but enough similarities to make me take heed.

 

[Justin Passing]

Here's your "hold for a year" chart
At Jan '25 You might have picked the S&P500 (Blue), because it's LOW COST.
This shows 18 months
Note that at Jan 25 there was no particular reason to use one of the others:

Green is Artemis Glob Inc
purple is Blackrock Gold & G.
Keeping the S&P500 for a year would be pretty dumb, imo.

Now, don't do your usual silly nit-picking.

 

[Justin Passing]

I'm holding quite a bit of cash, watching for dips to buy. AI is out of favour at the moment.

 

[Justin Passing]

Use a stock screener which gives you the recent history, pick a couple..
3x Korea, Emerging Markets,, anything data centre focused....
Many funds , even some Vanguard ones, are 50%+ up on the past 12 months.


I put a houseworth into this, what seems like yesterday.

Now it's about 3 houses, because I used Spread Betting which is 5x, and no tax to pay.

Look at Korea - where Samsung and SK Hynix (memory chips) live. Trebled since 01/01/26.

For a fund, steady, use EU index, Emerging Markets, Far east (Japan is unknown for a bit, but probably ok), Latin America has been good.
Artemis Global Income is 86(?) different shares so wellish enough diversified, and not much in the USA. 55% in the last 12 months.

Gold & SIlver probably have more to go up, but they can drop in a day so use an ETF with a stop loss - even then they might skip through.

They're coming up to the previous high so I'll flog em and wait to see if they break above.

One day Bitcoin may come back, but it's looking moribund.

 

[Justin Passing]

The mood in the market has turned down. One can look at the call options and put options to see what Traders think.
At the moment, "put " options are much more popular than call options.
An "out of the money put option" is where you buy the right to sell a share at a price which is lower than it's currently at. So if a share is at $200 you might pay $1 for the option to sell it at $150 dollars, up to some point in the future. The normal quantity is 100 shares so that would cost you $ 100.
If the price drops to 130 dollars you effectively buy the shares at 130 and exercise your option to sell them at 150 dollars. So you would make $2000 on your 100 share options. In practice you sell the option, you don't need to buy the shares.
If you think the price is going to go up, you can buy a "call" option which is the opposite of a put option.
Traders use options to Hedge their position ; so if they're holding a load of Apple shares expecting them to go up but don't want to lose if they go down, they buy an option to sell them like that.
If you buy a put option and the price goes up it expires worthless, but you had the insurance in case it went down.
If you're holding Apple shares, which is called a long position, then you need to be a bit nervous if the put options held, exceed the call options.
You can see the volumes -they are available on the platforms where you can buy and sell options.
THere is an ongoing worry that AI hasn't produced enough profit yet. There are people using AI such as the American Walmart which is like ASDA where they are planning to expand but without employing any more people, they're going to use AI instead to do their ordering and things like that. All the major sellers already use robots to move the goods about. Look for a YouTube to see Amazon's operation.

Firms switch to AI for things like bookkeeping.
Some companies are likely to be in trouble because it's going to be much easier, you don't need to employ an accountant , all you need is an AI agent which does bookkeeping. The agent is like a an expert who knows about bookkeeping, so you can more or less tell it what you want to do and it can take in all the figures and spit out all the forms and
You might have another one for employing people and so on. But they're cheap.

What seems to be happening is that although there are customers for the AI models which are out there now so they are selling, the manufacturers of the AI systems are piling all of their money plus a load of borrowed money into producing the next AI machine but there's no endpoint. There's an infinite level of intelligence which can be achieved, but sooner or later unless you can monetize it you're the brightest company on the Planet with nowhere to go.

It's like at the moment, the guys doing best in the gold mine are other ones selling the picks and shovels.

 

[Justin Passing]

Well, well.
The returns from some sectors, like Korea, have been spectacular, but dom swept in with T's Big Adventure in Iran.

I sold half early - you can always take the optimistic side if you do that. One never knows.
More things also took a hit of course, so the "sell half if not sure" paid off. I'm down what feels a lot, but looking back it's only about 12 days, so not too bad in the scale of things.
I'm "long" in Oil, with quite a tight Stop.
Maybe T will set up something to get the ships through Hormuz so oil might drop suddenly. So I'm not using OEICs, which take too long to trade.
I AM using CFD on the WTI Commodity, which is leveraged 10:1.
So if I buy with £10 I get action on £100 worth.
Then if the price rises by 10%, I double my money, less a tiny "swap" rate at about 0.01% per day.
Actually it's not going up all that fast, it's up about 20%. (76->91)

I try to catch swings in the precious metals, which have been a lot faster.
It's not a nice time and I was planning to go safer/ more passive. Too late!

A good learning exercise.
I saw that things which have been doing pretty well, most of the time, ie up about 40%+ on the past 12 months, weren't overly troubled to begin with. (like Atremis Global Interest) So in future I'll resort to those, spread around a bit, and get out if there are volatilities in small sectors which could have ramifications.
Gold/silver are unreliable as hell atm.
Again, both are highly leveraged, so big opportunities are valuable, but you have to be there.

Crypto is making a bit of a comeback too. Spreads are nasty, something like MARA is usually best to catch the moves with.

Overnight is when a lot happens on most things. Other than some Oil, I won't hold over right now.

Looking at the KOSPI ( S Korea) open, at about 1am, gives a steer on the following day in the west, so you can set pending limit orders.
Then you have to be up at 7am for when the western premarket opens. Tough!.

 

[Odds]

 

[Odds]

How badly has the Iran war hit the global economy? The tell-tale signs...​

Here’s how the 10 biggest stock exchanges have performed since February 28:

• New York Stock Exchange (NYSE): As of Monday morning, the NYSE Composite Index had fallen by 6 percent compared with the close on February 27.
• Nasdaq Stock Market: Shares trading on this barometer of tech stocks had fallen by 2.4 percent in the same timeframe.
• Shanghai Stock Exchange: As of Monday, the Shanghai Composite Index has fallen by 1.86 percent since February 28.
• Tokyo Stock Exchange: Also as of Monday, the Japan Nikkei 225 index has fallen by 11 percent since February 28.
• National Stock Exchange of India: The Nifty50, the benchmark index of India’s largest stock exchange, has fallen by 7 percent since February 28.
• Hong Kong Stock Exchange: As of Monday, the Hang Seng Index has fallen by about 4 per cent since the start of the war.
• London Stock Exchange: London’s FTSE 100 has fallen by 5.3 percent since the war began.
• Saudi Exchange (Tadawul): The Tadawul All-Share Index has been down by 9.6 percent since February 28.
• Euronext: Europe’s STOXX 600 has fallen by 6 percent since the war began.
• Australian Stock Exchange: As of mid-March, the ASX has fallen more than 6 percent due to the war.

 

[Justin Passing]

I've got some money in oil/gas, and less in gold, some in Defence. Ready to move .

My brother has an interesting question. He has three small renters down West. A tenant has just left, leaving some stuff needing to be repaired / replaced. Pressures on landlords are growing. The housing market hasn't done much. He's sensitive about tthe CGT on the gain since he bought, eg 40k on one which he bought at 80k, now worth 120k. It gets 650 net rent per month. (That works out to £6660. as a basic rate taxpayer which I think he is, just). Would he have been better in Stocks?
If you try to do a comparison with what did happen in stocks, and will and might happen, there are loads of factors. We just had a bit of a dump, you'd say, yes? Againsta that are different incomes at different rates and Tax bands. No problem for AI. It knows all the rates.
If you take the growth of a UCITS Global Fund over the past five years, stocks come out on top but not overwhelmingly.
There's a dissonance with my experience, which is using a pretty poorly quantified, "use what's going well" strategy.

A large proportion of my lump is always in three or two main areas. If there are many all doing as well as each other then fine, diversify. Warren Buffet said that you diversify if you don't know where to put your money, which is true, but you never know 100%, or anywhere near it.

This is what has happened in the last year, with some funds I was either using or contemplating. I wasn't in ALL of them at once. Note this DOES take in the dip last April when T waved his willy Tariff board about.

The Artemis fund, orange here and "pretty good" is made up of iirc about 80 shares/fuinds, and it's actively managed, so not much of it is in US Tech right now. There are other similar funds.

View attachment 410338

Other choices would have had highs earlier in the year. Europe, or Tech, say.

Even with two dips then, orange (AGI) is at about 45%.
Korea and Gold had a chunk of my money for a chunk of the year, which has pushed the year return number up a fair bit.

SO, I asked AI. I used Grok to run through the standard 11 sectors recognised by the Murricans, for stocks, and added a couple of my own. I gave it an idea what I wanted and it volunteered the rest.
The premis was based on looking atthe previous 2/3 monthe, 6/4 times a year, to see which sectors were good or dud. The worst sectors got no funds for the next period, the best got about 60%. So no clairvoyance and no frantic action, just adjusting the balance.

While the Global Fund approximately doubled in 5 years, the money shifting routine produced a gain over SEVEN times over 5 years.
It's more or less 47% each year. 1.5^5 =~7.6. Maybe I'll set up a bot to do just that, it would save me a lot of time.
Try it! . Of course you can alter the proporton of your funds you swap to those most highly growing sectors. I do it by a tightly controlled method of waving a damp finger in the air.

Compared with owning the flat, as explained before, you can choose not to pay tax on your growth.

 

[Justin Passing]

How badly has the Iran war hit the global economy? The tell-tale signs...​

Here’s how the 10 biggest stock exchanges have performed since February 28:

• New York Stock Exchange (NYSE): As of Monday morning, the NYSE Composite Index had fallen by 6 percent compared with the close on February 27.
• Nasdaq Stock Market: Shares trading on this barometer of tech stocks had fallen by 2.4 percent in the same timeframe.
• Shanghai Stock Exchange: As of Monday, the Shanghai Composite Index has fallen by 1.86 percent since February 28.
• Tokyo Stock Exchange: Also as of Monday, the Japan Nikkei 225 index has fallen by 11 percent since February 28.
• National Stock Exchange of India: The Nifty50, the benchmark index of India’s largest stock exchange, has fallen by 7 percent since February 28.
• Hong Kong Stock Exchange: As of Monday, the Hang Seng Index has fallen by about 4 per cent since the start of the war.
• London Stock Exchange: London’s FTSE 100 has fallen by 5.3 percent since the war began.
• Saudi Exchange (Tadawul): The Tadawul All-Share Index has been down by 9.6 percent since February 28.
• Euronext: Europe’s STOXX 600 has fallen by 6 percent since the war began.
• Australian Stock Exchange: As of mid-March, the ASX has fallen more than 6 percent due to the war.

Yes - or a guarded yes, as the source is Al Jazeera.
It's actually quite a small dip, compared with the gains of the previous months/years. One fund I remember had effectively gone back to the level it was at 6 weeks ago, which isn't overwhelming. Some of those comparisons are No big deal.
On that AI query, one set of numbers produced 840% gain, which has just dropped back to 780%.
Remember you DO have to average in, or you can cop thentire drop

I dropped a fair bit on S Korea, and moved fund-wise to the fuels, the only fossil fuels based fund which I have access to - Guinness Global Energy.
Not much though. The oil situation is news dependent, highly volatile. Some accounts I've just dumped into funds which grow at 4.3-7% pa,; I'll wait it out. On a given day, leveraged oil (10:1) moves a lot, but you do have to sit and watch it.

 

[Justin Passing]

It's very volatile.
I have bits of accounts spread about. Here's n old SIPP or something.
These changes in % per day are high, but nore the difference between the two Korea funds. In that case it's down to the delay in theirpublishing the numbers; some more than others.
Today:

For building - society type growth, you need 0.02% per day, so all those numbers are high, up or down.
They'll be down tomorrow .

(1.0002 ^250 = 5.12% pa)
1% a day is times 12 in a year.

 

[Odds]

Could oil hit $200 a barrel? Analysts no longer think it is far-fetched​

Prices are likely to rise substantially if the Strait of Hormuz remains, in effect, closed, market watchers say.

 

[Mottie]

Buy, buy, buy……