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The most important thing is to be clear on your investment goals and take risks accordingly. If you need 7-10% then all world trackers, even those a bit US heavy, will do nicely.
Trading Tips
- Thread starter Highway Man
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The point I was going to make is that people happily pay 5, 10, 15% of their salary into a pension for someone else to manage and invest, taking much bigger fees than any of the ETFs being discussed here.
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You are actually better off, making sure you take your funds in the most tax efficient way. it's not just about balancing the portfolio (property, cash, stocks, pensions etc). it's about maximising your allowances. Something I was very bad at doing when I was working.
Are you fully retired now or still have the company but taken a back seat?
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I'm retired... for now. still being paid though. I may do a bit here and there as I can't help myself.
I have some big trips coming up. I am thinking of taking the boat to the med for a few months. The alternative is do medium term rental (e.g. 8-10 weeks), which makes more sense.
Its not straight forward for ms motorbiking to leave the dog for so long - its her baby.
In the context of this thread, I have apparently been working by choice for the last 2 or so years, according to my FIRE analysis.
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Interesting read.
As y'all probably know, I'm active on the stock market, possibly at least as much as anyone here. Every day.
Interesting read, some of this thread. Everything anyone said is true, some of the time, for some situations.
We all like to comfort ourselves with short, simple, wise-sounding phrases though.
Most of them are much too simple, or actually wrong, a lot.
A most flawed aphorism is about Timing The Market.
The last time I heard it, it came from Neal Roberts, who is on youtube every day, earning a darned good income, buying and selling .
He has long term holdings, short term (ie days to weeks, called Swing trading), and intra-day positions, which could be for a few minutes.
So he's in and out of various stocks, all the time. If "Time In" were all that mattered, he'd stop now, because his oldest holdings must be best, right? Obviously Nonsense.
Timing is extremely important. Longer is not necessarily better.
JD has said be bought Europe instead of global or USA, or something similar. So did I. The time was right. His charts show exactly, that the timing MATTERS.
If something has been in a steady trend for weeks, or months, it probably won't dump tomorrow. A couple of years a go, Jupiter India went up about 1% every week, for a year. 55%, fine.
Before some stupid troll says, "oh, but you never know", you don't NEED to know, you take account of that, you feed in slowly. Once it has gone up 1% a day for 1 or 2 weeks say, you can increase your "position", and/or put a stop-loss under the price, the latter so you avoid losing anything. (OK unless something highly unusual happens). You can start off with a stop-loss, so you know/limit how much you lose if it goes off in the wrong direction.
I started buying selling when I saw that one of the little pensions we had had risen only something like 3.5% in a year. less the fees which were 2%.
I challenged their choice , and got a reply like, "Oh, yes, that's what we do because of your age; it's in a "safe" fund"". It's been moved, and is about 3x , now.
Do most people lose money when buying /selling frequently? Yes, because they don't know enough, or they're daft, or both. Hubris costs you.
They want to be a trader, so they seem to think the more they do, the better. No.
I've seen questions posted such as "I bought £1000 of Tesla. That's good, isn't it?". Stupid people about.
Some like to say that long-term is "Investing" and short term is "Trading".
Not really. The behaviour of the markets is such that if you were to look at a chart, you would have NO IDEA whether you were looking at seconds or years, if it didn't say. "Investing" all too often means "abandoning and hoping". In other words, being rather dumb about it.
Of course it matters WHEN you buy WHAT.
Would you have Invested in this stock where the vertical dashed lines are?
Of course not. It was dropping like a rock. no indication whatsoever that it might change, from the chart.
Recently it turned UP about 1st April when seniment in Iran changed. I bought where the 0% line is. (I'm up 55%, in about a week)
I'll see what we hear tomorrow about the Straight being closed - I may sell all or some if it hesitates. It'll probably go up again when there's some sort of agreement. I have stop-losses at 45% and 40%.
People say "Buy the dip", But you can't predict the dip (unless it's at a pre-used Level). You buy just AFTER the dip, preferably where there's an uptrend going on. See https://www.investopedia.com/terms/p/pullback.asp
Those pullbacks can take minutes, or months...
If anyone wants lessons on this sort of thing, there are loads of youtubes.
You will need to learn what Catalysts, Levels, Accumulation, break-outs, fake-outs, momentum, resistance, support, range trading, and a few other things, are. Then Slippage, Spreads, and crappy platforms like Trading212. And Stocks, Bonds, ETFs and Managed Funds.
You can use dummy accounts to practice.
My woman-wot-does, has remortgaged her house, at 5.3%.. There will be some spare, so she could put it in a S&S ISA at 3.75% for uninvested cash, and put some in a stock when there's a good reason. Soon she won't want to work for me any more...
So what would I say do with 20k right now?
Property - forget it. annual rise in London is curently NEGATIVE 1.9%, Wales is up to something like 4%. New laws are trouble. Tenants can be a lot of trouble. Not worth it unless you have millions. I started off having renters - I went through about 12 early on. Financially quite complex. Soaks up quite a lot of time. Your asset is not at all liquid.
Use a platform/account where you don't have to invest in anything , to earn a percentage, then you have free funds without having to sell which takes a couple of days to "settle".. Use IG for example.
I'd look at funds which invest in stocks which pay good dividends. Those score well on "return per risk".
If you stick to UK you're free of FX fees and rate change worries.
Tickers for those include IUKD 4.5%div, +28% and UKDV, a bit less.
Individual stocks can be better - here are some suggestions - just drop this into Excel as a CSV file
Check the charts. Most are forming a "double top " ( look that up) and in a couple of cases they're at "Resistance" which they may or may not ignore. A good reason to try a little and see if the price breaks higher. Be aware of price dips on ex div dates.
Company,Dividend Yield,12-Month Performance
Legal & General,8.0%,+10%
M&G,6.8%,+54%
Taylor Wimpey,8.7%,+22%
Admiral Group,4.7%,+5%
Aviva,6.1%,+35%
WPP,5.8%,+53%
British American Tobacco,5.9%,-8%
BP,4.3%,-12%
Vodafone 3.4%,+55%.
Rio Tinto,4.3%,+59%
HSBC,4.08%,+57%
Natwest, Lloyds similar
A couple of these (L&G?) are potential take-over targets, which would be be a bonus.
These price rises are not likely to be repeated, future performance yada yada...
'Disclosure' I don't use any of these. 50% is ok as a backstop but not particularly attractive. For banks I use 3BAL, which is up 50% since April 1. I believe I've mentioned that before. It rose 500% in 2025. It's up 10x since I bought in Jan '24. It's volatile - you need to watch it and use "price action" (look that up) to get the best from it.
If you want to see how 50% in a day works by just following a pattern, see a recent post in the SM dealing thread.
Once you've learned a dozen patterns, that can be most days.
As y'all probably know, I'm active on the stock market, possibly at least as much as anyone here. Every day.
Interesting read, some of this thread. Everything anyone said is true, some of the time, for some situations.
We all like to comfort ourselves with short, simple, wise-sounding phrases though.
Most of them are much too simple, or actually wrong, a lot.
A most flawed aphorism is about Timing The Market.
The last time I heard it, it came from Neal Roberts, who is on youtube every day, earning a darned good income, buying and selling .
He has long term holdings, short term (ie days to weeks, called Swing trading), and intra-day positions, which could be for a few minutes.
So he's in and out of various stocks, all the time. If "Time In" were all that mattered, he'd stop now, because his oldest holdings must be best, right? Obviously Nonsense.
Timing is extremely important. Longer is not necessarily better.
JD has said be bought Europe instead of global or USA, or something similar. So did I. The time was right. His charts show exactly, that the timing MATTERS.
If something has been in a steady trend for weeks, or months, it probably won't dump tomorrow. A couple of years a go, Jupiter India went up about 1% every week, for a year. 55%, fine.
Before some stupid troll says, "oh, but you never know", you don't NEED to know, you take account of that, you feed in slowly. Once it has gone up 1% a day for 1 or 2 weeks say, you can increase your "position", and/or put a stop-loss under the price, the latter so you avoid losing anything. (OK unless something highly unusual happens). You can start off with a stop-loss, so you know/limit how much you lose if it goes off in the wrong direction.
I started buying selling when I saw that one of the little pensions we had had risen only something like 3.5% in a year. less the fees which were 2%.
I challenged their choice , and got a reply like, "Oh, yes, that's what we do because of your age; it's in a "safe" fund"". It's been moved, and is about 3x , now.
Do most people lose money when buying /selling frequently? Yes, because they don't know enough, or they're daft, or both. Hubris costs you.
They want to be a trader, so they seem to think the more they do, the better. No.
I've seen questions posted such as "I bought £1000 of Tesla. That's good, isn't it?". Stupid people about.
Some like to say that long-term is "Investing" and short term is "Trading".
Not really. The behaviour of the markets is such that if you were to look at a chart, you would have NO IDEA whether you were looking at seconds or years, if it didn't say. "Investing" all too often means "abandoning and hoping". In other words, being rather dumb about it.
Of course it matters WHEN you buy WHAT.
Would you have Invested in this stock where the vertical dashed lines are?
Of course not. It was dropping like a rock. no indication whatsoever that it might change, from the chart.
Recently it turned UP about 1st April when seniment in Iran changed. I bought where the 0% line is. (I'm up 55%, in about a week)
I'll see what we hear tomorrow about the Straight being closed - I may sell all or some if it hesitates. It'll probably go up again when there's some sort of agreement. I have stop-losses at 45% and 40%.
People say "Buy the dip", But you can't predict the dip (unless it's at a pre-used Level). You buy just AFTER the dip, preferably where there's an uptrend going on. See https://www.investopedia.com/terms/p/pullback.asp
Those pullbacks can take minutes, or months...
If anyone wants lessons on this sort of thing, there are loads of youtubes.
You will need to learn what Catalysts, Levels, Accumulation, break-outs, fake-outs, momentum, resistance, support, range trading, and a few other things, are. Then Slippage, Spreads, and crappy platforms like Trading212. And Stocks, Bonds, ETFs and Managed Funds.
You can use dummy accounts to practice.
My woman-wot-does, has remortgaged her house, at 5.3%.. There will be some spare, so she could put it in a S&S ISA at 3.75% for uninvested cash, and put some in a stock when there's a good reason. Soon she won't want to work for me any more...
So what would I say do with 20k right now?
Property - forget it. annual rise in London is curently NEGATIVE 1.9%, Wales is up to something like 4%. New laws are trouble. Tenants can be a lot of trouble. Not worth it unless you have millions. I started off having renters - I went through about 12 early on. Financially quite complex. Soaks up quite a lot of time. Your asset is not at all liquid.
Use a platform/account where you don't have to invest in anything , to earn a percentage, then you have free funds without having to sell which takes a couple of days to "settle".. Use IG for example.
I'd look at funds which invest in stocks which pay good dividends. Those score well on "return per risk".
If you stick to UK you're free of FX fees and rate change worries.
Tickers for those include IUKD 4.5%div, +28% and UKDV, a bit less.
Individual stocks can be better - here are some suggestions - just drop this into Excel as a CSV file
Check the charts. Most are forming a "double top " ( look that up) and in a couple of cases they're at "Resistance" which they may or may not ignore. A good reason to try a little and see if the price breaks higher. Be aware of price dips on ex div dates.
Company,Dividend Yield,12-Month Performance
Legal & General,8.0%,+10%
M&G,6.8%,+54%
Taylor Wimpey,8.7%,+22%
Admiral Group,4.7%,+5%
Aviva,6.1%,+35%
WPP,5.8%,+53%
British American Tobacco,5.9%,-8%
BP,4.3%,-12%
Vodafone 3.4%,+55%.
Rio Tinto,4.3%,+59%
HSBC,4.08%,+57%
Natwest, Lloyds similar
A couple of these (L&G?) are potential take-over targets, which would be be a bonus.
These price rises are not likely to be repeated, future performance yada yada...
'Disclosure' I don't use any of these. 50% is ok as a backstop but not particularly attractive. For banks I use 3BAL, which is up 50% since April 1. I believe I've mentioned that before. It rose 500% in 2025. It's up 10x since I bought in Jan '24. It's volatile - you need to watch it and use "price action" (look that up) to get the best from it.
If you want to see how 50% in a day works by just following a pattern, see a recent post in the SM dealing thread.
Once you've learned a dozen patterns, that can be most days.
Last edited:
Is this the same man from October of last year? "Travel to Southampton tomorrow, Hotel for the night in Southampton and then escorted to our Suite along with the other rich and famous people who are traveling in a suite"
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I suppose it does seem crazy that I am not already a succesfull trader, but this is one area that I have no idea of how to go about or even understand it. I would imagine if I did do it though I would be like the wolf of wall street and be a massive success.
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I am gathering that. I am not persuing this any further. It was just an idea I had but I am leaving it at just that.
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OMGHe was a fraud
He still owes c. $100 million, according to Google.
Wimp
