Several lads here seem to have a grasp of investments and so on. Do any of you have a regular income outside "earner income"? What kind of category does it fall into, and how did you come into it?
I had a nice image, but brian isn't playing ball today. It's a list of different (very broad) types of income:
1 Earner income : work a job
2 Profit income : buy and sell
3 Interest income: lending money
4 Dividend income: owning stock
5 Rental income: renting out property
6 Capital gains : assets increase in value
7 Royalties: others use your work
I imagine it was something the banks managed to get written into the regulation when ISAs first got invented, to reduce competition (and perhaps make it easier for HMRC).
You can pay into two ISAs in the same year, anyway, you just can't have more than one active at a time. So you can close one and transfer it to a new one at a different provider.
Obviously the smart thing to do would be to set up a Lifetime ISA (4k limit per year + 1k gov bonus) if you want a buy a house, and then fill up a stocks and shares ISA which will save you a few quid once you start selling investment to withdraw profits - rather than the taxman robbing it to fund Styrofoam schools and novelty face masks.
It's trading at a 45% discount to the net asset value, meaning the dividend yield is over 10%, because sentiment on infrastructure investments has taken a massive hit.
>>9758 I wouldn't. The longer term risk is the liabilities it holds but even in the short term:
1. It's September and it looks like this one won't break with tradition.
2. Data infrastructure will absolutely moon with demand but you won't see the shortage bite until further down the line.
3. The first mover for this would be the government pulling it's finger out and supporting the UK sector but there's a spending review coming up so expect fuck-all to be announced until next year.
4. No fucking way it can maintain a 10% divvie.
I'd wait until at least mid-late October and see what happens. Your biggest risk now would be if they announce a cut to the dividend the market is pricing for and the shift in leadership this year really was the rats jumping ship before it goes under.
If you're interested in data then Amazon put a lot of money into data infrastructure prior to the AI craze that is proving to be an amazing bet.
>1. It's September and it looks like this one won't break with tradition.
We're only a few trading days into September. Nobody knows if this is going to be another difficult September for stocks. Some statistics leave hope that this time could be different. One statistic I saw argued that Septembers have been strong in years where the S&P climbed more than 10 percent (or something) YOY from August of the last year. This is the case this year, we were up 25 percent YOY at the end of August of 2023.
That in itself could be cause for concern, but if we count from the beginning of 2023, it's only 19 percent. Which is still a sizeable rally, but not unheard of after a 25-percent bear market the preceding year.
I'd say markets still have upside potential. It's not certain that September will be a good month on balance, but there's also nothing indicating that it'll be unusualy challenging.
You can still claim the bonus when you reach the age of 60. Obviously it's more difficult to plan on that kind of timescale. There are potentially better ways of saving for retirement, depending on your plans and your tax circumstances.
I got in on the S&P in mid-September around 4,500 and it's been nothing but a ballache. I wasn't expecting instant returns, but it's taking the piss now.
>>9771 If the last two years are anything to go by then never. We're going to zero - the stock market will close, money will inflate away and we'll be free.
I'm kicking myself for not selling Rivian stock that I bought for $25 last year. Which seemed like a good discount at the time, and it did go back up to $39 at one point after I bought it, but the last year or so it's only been fluctuating and now it's back to around $16.
I could've sold it for a small profit this summer when it was trading around $27, after going down to just $12 a few months before, but greed got the better of me. And the EV industry is probably going to continue to consolidate, which will mean tighter profit margins in the foreseeable future. The stock's overall trend is firmly pointed downward since the IPO in late 2021.
Looks like this is going to be a very long-term investment. Unless there's going to be another sudden rally. I'd be happy to sell for 27 to 30. That would still give me a very tidy profit.
The IPO price was $78, so a third of that somehow seemed a good deal at $25. And I could've made a killing selling at 39, but again, I guess I was too greedy, which is never a good thing in the stock market.
I've only got 150 shares, but it's still annoying.
>>9777 > I guess I was too greedy, which is never a good thing in the stock market.
I have started to make more money by only trading once or twice per year. I have also moved a lot into income trading too, it's nice to watch 8% dividends coming in monthly.
I don't trade that often either. Unless a stock goes through the roof right after I buy it and gives me a more than reasonable return, I usually hold stocks for longer.
I tried short term- and even day trading for a while and suffered a painful (but entirely survivable) loss. Unlike some day traders who bet and then lose the farm.
Next year, please can PNL.L start doing what it is supposed to, and rise with inflation. Also can the discount be reduced on UK stocks, like Merryn keeps saying it will.
>>9804 AWS has indeed been subsidising the rest of the operation since it went big, though in recent years it's not been for lack of trying to make other parts of the business profitable.
In particular, one of the two major running jokes about AWS is their data charges, since you pay for both ingress and egress, and for most traffic within AWS you get hit at both ends. The other one is how nobody knows us-east-2 exists.
>>9803 Amazon as a service to buy things is largely unusable for me at this point, bloated, unreliable reviews, cheap tat over solid branded items, never really delivers on time and one time they sent me a broken toothbrush which I returned, they said I didn't return and tried to charge me for until I emailed Jeff Bezos and his exec team sorted out my refund.
>>
No. 9808Anonymous 7th February 2024 Wednesday 5:56 pm9808How individual investors get fucked by AIM insiders
1. Tiny AIM company wants to raise some money for another helium drill.
2. AIM company tells all their city mates that the raise is coming soon.
3. Said mates sell all their shares in tiny helium driller, tanking the share price.
4. Tiny helium driller issues millions more shares. These shares are sold directly to the city boys at a 50% discount to the current share price.
5. Share price recovers on a bit of good news.
6. City boys sell off the shares they got at a discount. Stupid private investor buys the shares, thinking that the 3p must be a good deal because it was 6p only months ago (ignoring that there are now twice as many shares in issues).
7. Cycle continues until city boys have enough yachts.
My cryptocurrency investments, for which I paid approximately £3,700 in total, have just passed £3000 in value for the first time since they plummeted to fuck all. Yippee!
>>9717 >>9719 >>9721 It turns out that this was a really fucking stupid idea. I just put a grand in UKW and a grand in BP in the end but all my assumptions were wrong, we've had a warm winter without much snow, lower short-term energy prices and general pessimism is impacting UKW's discount rate and Rachel Reeves has ripped up support for wind. What's really killing the industry at the moment though is the supply chain disruption which is fragile at the best of times.
I'm a bit sour that I didn't plough everything into Rheinmetall considering 'things to kill Russian convicts with' is a booming industry right now and it is so bloody obvious in hindsight. Same with CRWD what with the democracy business and risk that Biden will have his telegraph machine hacked. I was still smart enough to do NATP though which should hopefully be a better investment over the longer-term.
>>9810 Bitcoins are now at their highest price ever, and I am in the black for the first time since a couple of weeks after I bought them at their previous highest-ever price. The reason for the insanely skyrocketing price is apparently that banks are buying up vast amounts of cryptocurrency and driving the price up. This makes the new high price feel a bit artificial, but then at the same time, the banks won't want their new investment to lose value so perhaps it is okay for me to hold hodl on for a bit longer. Or maybe I am about to see it collapse down to nothing again, and be angry with myself for another 2-3 years as the cycle repeats itself.
Looks like there's been another couple of cut and run exit scams on one of the darknet markets due to this recent spike. Lots of juicy drama to keep up with if you are into that sort of thing, but the trend usually is that there's a fall off in crypto when they try and dump a shitload of it onto the market to cash out their ill gotten gains. Keep your ears to the ground.
In the end I gained about £50. £650 buys and £700 sells, over a year and a half.
It was a rollercoaster though, and I was underwater most of the time. In the end I decided I didn't want to play a rigged game any more, so I took my cards off the table.
In the process I have learned more about how the market works, though. In particular about how market caps (and especially share prices) cannot be expected to revert to previous highs. The company is constantly spending that market cap and eroding it, and if that spending is not directed efficiently (and luckily) then the share price will steadily be eaten away until the company goes bankrupt. As a retail investor you have little idea about whether the company spending is being done efficiently, so you will be exploited by the people who do know (city boys).
This seems obvious in hindsight, but has to experienced to be really understood. Unfortunately HE1 was not my only mistake - see pic (GDR).
>>9816 >The company is constantly spending that market cap and eroding it
Say what now? Market cap is share price times number of shares issued, not money a company has available to spend. If you bought a share for £10 and sold it to me for £100, the company doesn't have any more than what they sold it for originally, which may well have been £1. I suppose a company could raise additional credit based on its increasing share price but that doesn't immediately change the bottom line. Some companies periodically raise funds by issuing more shares, diluting the existing shares' value; and other companies do the exact opposite by buying back their shares from the open market with excess cash.
We live in an age where some companies don't even have to be profitable for their share prices to go up and up, for a long long time.
>The reason for the insanely skyrocketing price is apparently that banks are buying up vast amounts of cryptocurrency and driving the price up. This makes the new high price feel a bit artificial, but then at the same time, the banks won't want their new investment to lose value so perhaps it is okay for me to hold hodl on for a bit longer.
Big investors are doing the same thing they always do. They drive the price up when they're already invested so they can sell off their shares or assets at a premium to suckers who think the asset will only keep rising.
They don't really have to buy up "vast amounts" either at this point of the chart. All it takes is a few days with otherwise low trade volume, where you can drive prices up with relatively small turnover. They will make the real profit by offloading their cryptocurrency they bought during the last (2022) crypto winter when prices were a fraction of wwhat they are now. And even if they then sell into a market that starts to fall, they'll still make a profit compared to the moment they bought the lion share of their cryptocurrency.
Remember, all markets depend on there being a bigger sucker than you, who is willing to pay even more for something than you did. What we could be seeing at the moment is another run-up to the point where the market once again runs out of bigger suckers. With entirely predictable consequences.
>>9820 >They don't really have to buy up "vast amounts" either at this point of the chart. All it takes is a few days with otherwise low trade volume, where you can drive prices up with relatively small turnover.
This is incidentally the same reason that your average person no longer has any real prospect of becoming a crypto millionaire, since if you have any significant quantity of it then simply trying to sell even modest quantities can tank the price.
>since if you have any significant quantity of it then simply trying to sell even modest quantities can tank the price.
This is potentially true for any traded asset. Which is why for example a company's market capitalisation is only a theoretical measure of the combined worth of its stock at a given stock price per share. You will not be able to sell all existing shares of a company at that price at the same time. And if you tried, the market capitalisation would immediately drop close to zero because a sudden gigantic supply of shares for sale would meet few interested buyers. It's not completely dissimilar to crypto.
Which is why institutional investors, when they want to disinvest larger stock portfolios, usually sell their shares piecemeal in relatively small numbers per transaction. Some of it is done in dark pools that don't really affect valuation on the open market, but plenty of it still happens on the open market, where those investors then enlist banks that put the shares to market using algorithmic trading, to further decrease the risk of the stock taking a meaningful hit while they are still selling.
But as a retail investor, you should be fine selling off even a hundred thousand quid worth of stock of a broadly traded blue chip company. It'll barely be a blip on the screen.
If you got into crypto at a time when it was a few dollars per bitcoin, then yes, you'll have your work cut out trying to sell them. But unless your portfolio is worth several billion, it shouldn't affect price action. And even if you have several billion, you'll probably only need to sell off a few bitcoin at a time to live off your fortune and maintain cash liquidity for your running costs and personal expenses. At that level of wealth, it's not advisable to have everything in liquid assets anyway. You can afford to have a lot of it in illiquid, long-term assets. Of which bitcoin could be seen as one, albeit with the known risk of drastic value fluctuation. And an uncertain future, because even though it has had a phaenomenal run since its inception fifteen years ago, that doesn't guarantee it will always be like that. But that's a story for another time.
>>9821 You repeat this every cycle, but you're just talking bollocks. You could certainly move the needle by a few percent, momentarily and on one exchange, if you submitted a £1m market sell order like a dribbling idiot unfamiliar with trading 101, but you'd still have your £1m in fiat. You could spend a day or a week submitting smaller limit orders and you could exit without appreciably moving the needle or if you don't like pointless work, you sign up to an OTC desk and submit the entire trade outside of the order book (you need about £100k to qualify).
Every single day 900 Bitcoin are being minted. For the price to go up as it has, people are buying the vast majority of those with real cash and much more bitcoin besides. A million quid flowing to and from in crypto doesn't even raise an eyebrow. Stop fucking lying.
>You could certainly move the needle by a few percent, momentarily and on one exchange, if you submitted a £1m market sell order like a dribbling idiot unfamiliar with trading 101, but you'd still have your £1m in fiat.
Technically, you wouldn't, because your £1m order probably wouldn't get filled at £1m. The downtick of a few percent in the market would be because your order, or at least part of it, was filled at the lower price.
Do any of you lads have any index ETFs as long-term investments? So far I've only done short-term trading of very minor amounts that I've put in leveraged ETFs.
I'm thinking about getting in on it and putting aside something like £300-£500 a month to increase my financial health when I'm retired. I'll be far from destitute when I stop working, that's already a near-enough certainty, but it'd be nice to have something extra. I'm 49 now, so the investment horizon would be about 20 to 25 years. I'm self employed, so I decide when I retire, but I can see myself doing what I do for another 20+ years.
>>9824 I just checked the order book for BTCUSDC on Coinbase. Provided you went with that more liquid market, it wouldn't be a few percent at all. You'd tank the BItcoin price by 40-50 dollars if you submitted a market sell order for $1.6m.
As for your obvious nitpick, I had rounded the ~£980k to £1m because that sort of loss doesn't come close to warranting the kind of fatalist nonsense in >>9821.
>>9823 I don't care how many fancy words you try and wrap it up in, we're not buying your bags.
>Stop fucking lying.
There exist literally years of empirical evidence of attempts to sell more than a few grand worth of crypto being enough to move the market, even with Bitcoin. Even if you manage to successfully sell a significant quantity, then you need to get the money out of the exchange. Even if the exchange doesn't experience "technical problems" while trying to process your withdrawal, trying to move a five- or six-figure sum, even in smaller amounts, is going to trigger some form of intervention.
The world would be measurably better if people could stop pretending their shit digital carnival tokens were somehow a real thing.
>>9825 >Do any of you lads have any index ETFs as long-term investments?
Yes but after starting to type this I realised that I should also say to prepare yourself as this can be so goddamn complicated. In my situation I own two different kinds of ISA - Lifetime and Stocks & Shares, which makes it simple as they have the same fee structure.
For me, it's more efficient to hold tracker ETFs (and/or stocks too, same platform fees) than funds on HL given the fee structure so long as you're biting a large sum and then holding. 0.45% fund fees v 0.45% but capped at £45 (so, more effective over 10k total portfolio) - you'll just have to eat the trading fees for buying and selling. It also means I can actually hold indices for the Toronto and Sydney which is what got me looking into it initially.
Obviously this is for HL, if you use another broker than the math will be different. If you use SIPP, which sounds like the product you want, then the cap rises to £200 on HL.
>I'm thinking about getting in on it and putting aside something like £300-£500 a month to increase my financial health when I'm retired.
I think what you're planning on doing is buying some very basic index trackers and then leaving it all alone, right? If so I would probably go Vanguard or work out who is offering the best deposit bonus at the moment. Again it sounds like you want a SIPP.
Then compare fee structures, as a VERY general rule an ETF is cheaper to hold than a fund but comes with additional fees for buying and selling. As a rule I don't do trades for ETFs and shares under £1k for this reason because the fixed upfront is prohibitive, instead I invest in a cheap fund until it reaches the level I want. Then I try my very best to leave shit alone.
>I think what you're planning on doing is buying some very basic index trackers and then leaving it all alone, right?
Pretty much. It's supposed to be money that is meant for my retirement, so that I can be a bit more generous with my expenses when the time comes. And I don't want to touch it before that, or parts of it, unless I absolutely have to.
One obvious choice as an underlying would probably be the S&P, as it's a backbone of so many retirement plans and savings schemes worldwide. But I'm a bit hesitant to start buying at or around the current all time high. Then again, any downturn now would probably be more than compensated by clever cost averaging in the future.
>>9830 Well the S&P has averaged 9.24% over the last 150 years. Unless you're withdrawing in the next 1-5 years then by historic metrics you'll at worse underperform, if the world's largest multinational index crashes and stays that way then your money won't be worth anything anyway.
If you you know something is coming then just keep your powder dry elsewhere - money market funds, bonds, mail-order bride, credit unions.
I've heard a lot of chatter that the markets are going to crash on the 8th, from people susceptible to conspiracy theories. It might be self-fulfilling if a number of people cash out around then, so could be a good buying opportunity.
Daytrading is a pretty idiotic thing to do on a good day. You as a human trader are up against some of the fastest and most capable computers in existence.
It's not so much bringing a knife to a gunfight as it is bringing a toothpick to fight Skynet.
If you actually do daytrading nowadays, you deserve every quid you lose. I've no sympathy. It's well known that only about one percent of daytraders are actually profitable long-term, i.e. they turn any net profit at all that isn't zero or negative. And with strategies that aren't replicable. So it still doesn't guarantee you'll even make a living.
>>9841 Completely agree. I work in this field. The professionals have been entirely automated as you say since the early noughties (the London market was computerised at the end of the 90s), so to see these chumps streaming their manual point and clicking on the charts in this way is sheer lunacy.
I tried my hand at daytrading around 2008-2010, in any case about 15 years ago. That was a time when you could definitely sense a gradual change in markets, and where price action and chart patterns became ever more unpredictable for you as a human trader. I think that was when algorithmic and high frequency trading really began to entirely dominate the market. Before that, you could still now and then do news trading as a human trader by observing live news (CNBC was my go-to), then pouring a cup of coffee and then buying a stock that was going up on positive news, because even if you had your coffee first, there was still enough time to get in and net a few percent profit. Nowadays, all the price action happens within microseconds, so that by the time you've even read and grasped the news, the stock has already gone up as high as it's going to go. Those crazy vertical spikes you see on realtime charts nowadays from one second to the next didn't normally happen like that back in the day. Or at least they were kind of uncommon.
So I eventually stopped daytrading, with a bit of a painful loss, but with lessons learned. Some people never learn, and lose everything. There's loads of stories. The biggest noose around your neck will be attempting to recover previous losses. So you begin to take ever greater risks, which will deplete your remaining funds even faster.
