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Hiya folks. I`ve got my ISA into a stocks and shares one for this year, bought shares in a few companies and some have made a good % and obviously others haven't. Currently getting tips from many Youtubers which seem to be late to the party when this info has been dished out although still making the cash.
For those of you who do invest in the stock market how do you find which companies to buy shares in?
Cheers!
I don't. I buy managed funds in certain sectors. Spread the risk. I also invest for the long term and ignore most market movements - what's that they say, "time in the market beats timing the market".
I used to try and pick individual companies but quite frankly, I was no better than throwing a dart at a list. By the time anyone is "tipping" a company in public all the info about it will have been priced into the market anyway.
Oh, you've not made anything until you sell. Everything else is just a paper gain/loss.
I buy accumalation ETFs rather than individual stocks, for example VWRP has 3000+ companies in it across all sectors and countries..
So any money i put in is split across those 3000 companies as fractional shares.
Get Accumalation rather than distributing though so any gains you make are auto-reinvested into the fund.
It's a 'safe' way to invest passivley.
This video is very informative:
I avoided stocks and went for Gold, coming up to a year now and it’s sat at 23% profit.
By the time anyone is "tipping" a company in public all the info about it will have been priced into the market anyway.
That's a good point, by the time the next 'hot stock' is widley known, you've already missed the boat... it's important to understand the difference between 'trading' and 'investing'.
managing a portfolio of hand picked stocks will quickly become a full time job, as youll need to be constantly analysing what to buy, what to hold, and what to sell. AKA you'll be a 'trader' rather than an 'investor'.
My stocks and shares ISA has filling a trump implosion rallied and rose quite well recently,it's taken a drop over night but still up.
My gold has done well (modest amount via the royal mint) is up over 30% it was higher as my initial even more modest amount was in before the big increase last year. I also have some physical silver coins as I wanted something shiny (not enough to buy a di2 xt mech)
Yeah I missed out on the big jump last year as couldn’t decide whether to go for it or not. Still happy with how it’s going, it also will just sit there unless I absolutely need it.
For those of you who do invest in the stock market how do you find which companies to buy shares in?
My approach over the last few years was to go for the companies that were doing shit and whose SP had plummeted. On the basis of what goes down generally goes up but what is already up can't go up as much.
Then when they plummeted more I double or quits 🙂
See THG, Cineworld, Intu, Assos, Amigo for my absolute dogs.
OTOH RR went up 1000% and BA, BP, Jet2 and various others more than made up for the dogs. Currently about 70% up over 3-5 years.
As I'm sure everyone will be along to tell me, it was a shit strategy, but great fun, and a **** load better than my miserable piece of shit L&G pension which is about 20% up over similar timescales.
TLDR; buy funds etc like the people above said 🙂 Apart from anything else it's cheaper when you come to sell.
I've just opened a stocks and shares ISA recently. Got the confidence from watching Damien talks money on utube. Really accessible. Tldr. Don't buy individual stocks. Pick a world index fund and leave it alone for long term. Trying to pick individual stocks as a beginner (or even most professionals )will not beat the above method.
Are you trying to create wealth over the long term or just want to do something with spare cash rather than shove it in savings/portfolio investments? If the former then research + diversify to spread risk + hold during dips. If the latter then treat it a bit more like gambling and make rash speculative decisions that you hope pay off (I do the latter with a few k but most of my savings are in investment funds or ISAs). I'm up 50% over the last 3 years and I have no real clue what I'm doing (investing in tech stocks mostly helps, for now...)
You will not outperform the market long term. If you enjoy tinkering and are doing most of this for fun, then fair enough.
Why would you go so a stocks and shares thread and start recommending funds and ETFs? It's like asking for recommendations for new full sus bike and being told to buy a fully rigid singlespeed instead. And why the hell do you have to be so damn preachy about it? Literally the first few comments on any thread about stocks will be someone quoting Buffet as though he's the only person ever to have made any money in the markets. You people are more tedious than vegans or Jehovah's Witnesses.
Anyway, to the OP, my advice would be to learn technical analysis (which can also be done via youtube) as it's the best way of separating the wheat from the chaff (IMO). If you're buying stocks where fundamentals and technicals align then you're giving yourself a much better chance. Equally, you need to know when to close a profitable position or cut a position that's going against you and that's also where technical analysis comes in very handy.
It's important to note that there are umpteen different way of making money in the markets and you have to find what works for you. I've told you to learn charting, but some people just can't read charts, whereas others trade entirely off charts. You have to try a little bit of everything and you will gradually gravitate to a certain approach which suits your particular skills. And even that will probably change over time.
As well as learning via your own experience, there's a great deal that can be learned from other people's - by reading books. There are thousands of them, but my personal favourites are the Market Wizards series by J.D. Schwager - they are a series of interviews with all types of different traders and investors talking about their path to success and their approach to markets. Apart from those, just read everything you can get your hands on. Magazines like the Investors Chronical can also be good for keeping abreast of current market UK affairs. Other good sources of info are Twitter/Bluesky where you can search for UK stocks by their ticker. The forums on lse.co.uk and uk.adfvn.com can also be very useful (and quite dangerous!). And tradingview is the best platform for charting stocks. And of course there's Youtube - don't just look for tips though, try and learn about people's approach to the markets and see if you can use anything. Twitter is the other great place for doing that as there's a lot of traders who post up trades while bored and waiting for the next move.
I'll give you a little idea of my person approach - I have twitter open throughout the day in order to keep up to date on breaking news, economics and uk stocks from private investors. Each day at 7am I will scan/read all the RNS news on the London Stock Exchange website to keep abreast of company developments, and some of that is often tradable on the day (like BP on Monday). I will also check in on the forums at lse.co.uk and adfvn just to get a feel for what's hot and what's being talked about. Plus I will flick through the charts of all the top risers and fallers on the day so see what's happening.
My favourite way to trade is to look at charts and find something that's breaking out from a prolonged consolidation with good volume. A great example recently would be Avacta where I traded it from 35.8 to 51p. Also did VCP yesterday 92 - 107p. Both classic breakout trades, VCP I had identified in previous weeks it had already broken out on 07/07 and had then retraced before going again. I have no idea of any company fundamentals, I barely even know what they do, but the point is you can still make money if you know how to read a chart. On the other hand, I am very familiar with Avacta because it has been a favourite stock of UK private investors since the pandemic when it first rose to fame (infamy?) and I have traded it many times. Once you have followed a particular stock from a long time you will start to get a feel for it, and often you can trade off that. I knew it was due a breakout and then looking at the chart from the 11/07 -23/07 you can see how the narrative flips, the volume starts to come in and you basically have all the conditions for an explosive breakout. It may well go higher in the coming week/days/months but for now I am out because that's how I prefer to trade - just off the chart and only with the very best risk/reward situations. That is my personal style that I have found works for me, other people in Avacta currently will have studied every document that the company has ever released and listened to every word spoken by the board, and probably couldn't care less about the chart. Their horizon will be longer than mine but I prefer to take the cash and find something new. There's always another opportunity!
I also invest in funds rather than individual shares. It seems to be the accepted wisdom for casual investors. You should do much better than cash isa's over the longer term without the risks of trading in individual shares.
You people are more tedious than vegans or Jehovah's Witnesses.
If only your sense of irony was as well tuned as your share selection.
First up, acknowledge the fact that there is no such thing as free money.
If a share is "good value" then inherently it also can't be good value because otherwise everyone else would acknowledge that it was good value, buy it, and it would cease to be good value. That applies from the most dull REITs (dull, predictable, easily quantifiable assets) to Tesla (yep, it's hyped to the moon, it's value has no relation to any fundamental metric but it's not a bad investment because mostly it still keeps going up).
No amount of spreadsheeting or reading of tea leaves can alter that. You may as well become an expert in horse racing because the odds of making a profit are about the same. If after watching a few youtubers you knew enough buy a specific share, then just imagine what Goldman Sachs can do with hundreds of economics* graduates, and then manipulate it with billions of dollars of investments. Then google how many youtubers and redditors have been investigated or convicted for shilling shares. It's easy money for the unscrupulous to buy shares, tell their followers it's going up, it goes up when they buy, short them, tell them to sell, rinse (your followers) and repeat.
Second, this is bulklshit "Why would you go so a stocks and shares thread and start recommending funds and ETFs? It's like asking for recommendations for new full sus bike and being told to buy a fully rigid singlespeed", you've walked into a bike shop, with no knowledge of bikes and asked for a bike. You have no bike riding skills, you are not a professional, you have no exceptional fitness, you have no maintenance knowlege. Recommending you a single speed hybrid is exactly the right thing to do!
ETF's, REITs and the like are still far more risky than a cash isa or government bonds.
*the study of the Reflected-sound-of-underground-spirits
Funds are fine when they are performing but be aware of the fees. I invested in Fundsmith near the beginning and it was great until the last few years.
I watched the Holdings and the trading of the fund for a long time, in the last few years they made some decisions I disagreed with and the fees began to grate when the fund wasn't performing.
A couple of years ago I opened my own S&S ISA and have managed to outperform Fundsmith since. I look at the companies that the big investment funds hold and look to hold long term but do trade when a stock stagnates.
Why would you go so a stocks and shares thread and start recommending funds and ETFs?
Because the OP is a beginner - and an ETF fund is stocks, it's basicaly a prepackaged collection based on sector, geo location etc so there's loads to choose from and they are adjusted periodicaly for performance so you don't need to worry about what companies to pick or how much to invest in each compared to the other, the balancing is done for you.
OP hasn't really said whether they are investing or trading, or what their appetite for risk is, or what their goals are...so it's a valid, and sensible suggestion.
In terms of investment, having 100% in equities is considered high risk already, never mind just investing in hand picked stocks rather than 'safer' 'steadier' all world ETF or whatever..
So a lot will depend on the OP's goals - do they already have a healthy workplace pension and a healthy SIPP? mortgage paid off? do they hold a lot of cash savings? any other assets? do they need it for a bridge to fund the gap between retiring early and when their pensions kick in, etc etc.
The only one preaching here is you, blindly reccomending buying individual stocks without knowing the first thing about the OPs situation.
Funds are fine when they are performing but be aware of the fees.
The trick is to open an S&S ISA, or SIPP on a fee free platform such as invest engine or T212. then you buy into a fund within that, so what I did for example was buy Vanguard VWRP. That fund has a fee of 0.22% but anyone buying into that fund pays that, regardles of what investment platform they use.. that's just what it costs.
Wow what an arrogant rant from Jamz. As above the title 'getting into s and s' sounds like beginner talk and whilst rather boring an etf fund is a great way for a total beginner to start with buying shares without as much risk as picking individual shares and spending all day staring at a screen trying to second guess the market. Buy fund. Leave it alone and make a better return than cash in the long run.
Yeah, I don't agree with Jamz either.
It's well documented that trackers regularly outperform a majority of fund managers who do it for a living.
Why exactly an amateur punter thinks they can reliabily outperform the market, and why you would ever want to put that much energy into keeping tabs on market movements - I have no idea.
Why exactly an amateur punter thinks they can reliabily outperform the market, and why you would ever want to put that much energy into keeping tabs on market movements - I have no idea.
It's basically impossible - once you understand how high frequency trading works - its all done by robots... humans don't stand a chance
Complete and utter BS from mattyfez and thisisnotaspoon.
OP said that he has already bought some stocks and specifically asked 'how do you find which companies to buy shares in?' So I answered his question, and it looks like myself and thegeneralist were the only two people in the thread to actually do so.
Ah well, I have offered the red pill for anybody who has the balls to take some risk. It can be done, many small investors do it successfully every day, don't let the armchair experts put you off trying. Bonne chance.
Just came here to LOL at jamz with his full house of bullshit bingo jargon. Charts! Technical analysis! Breakout trades! Yeah right.
If there was genuinely free money to be made, and he believed his methods, he'd be a multimillionaire many times over.
Are you, jamz?
LOL
Nothing wrong with investing in individual shares if you don't mind a bit of risk and think it's fun. I've been doing it for a few decades, think one of my best buys was Dominos (not the actual pizza, well ok I did buy a few of them but I'm talking about the shares). Most of what I do these days is just trying to avoid paying too much CGT though, buyouts etc can return large chunks of gain at inconvenient times. I've no idea whether I've outperformed any specific index, I have probably outperformed most funds that take a management fee however, just because of that factor.
Two big advantages of funds etc are that they are more practical for small investments and you can diversify internationally much more easily. Plus, once you have a decent amount built up, it's just less to keep track of. 100 different shares is a lot of paperwork and information to process, there's always mergers and returns of capital and....and it's a lot of work for the tax return each year. Even if you understand what the actual tax liabilities are (which I do for the most part). But it's still probably worth my while compared to paying maybe 0.5% management fee.
But whatever you do, don't waste your time reading charts, you might as well look at tea leaves.
only advice I can offer is if you do take the red pill, don't gamble with more than you can afford to lose.
Many small investors do it successfully every day = many small investors lose a lot of money every day as well.
Out of interest @jamz - you clearly know what you're doing but even with that knowledge what's your success rate, I assume the wins outweigh the losses if not in number then in value (you can only ever lose 100% of your investment vs gaining 1000%'s) but choice by choice do you get it 90% right? 50% right?
(I used to be a member of a small share club where some of the members tooki it very seriously and even then we couldn't pick a dog from a star)
I reckon Jamz is actaully a hedge fund manager who's realised what he really needs is more retail investors to fleece
This will put a few off stocks & shares no doubt
I'm sure it will. I manage my mums investments to pay for her dementia care. Her holding of that took a big hit on that BUT it's just an argument for
1) Tracker funds. I'd got a few actively managed funds as well as trackers and the only one that has outperformed trackers is Janus Tech Leaders Up 6x over 10 years. However a US index fund has done 4x in 10 years and nearly as well as the Janus (+71% vs +96% since I've held) which is because it's the same tech unicorns driving both.
Comparison - Vanguard Global tracker has achieved about 2x in 10 years.
warning - past performance and all that.
2) Diversification. The Woodford fund was one of about 15 holdings so even though it massively underperformed it didn't have a major impact on the portfolio - losses on that more than covered by the funds above. Theres is a bit in UK infrastructure and some bond holdings which have both lost capital value but again, overall it's done well.
Some great replies there lads, thanks so much for taking the time to do them 😀
At the moment I`ve 68 companies and the S&P 500 invested in, 35 of these are in the red. I`ve a decent pension, mortgage paid off ,savings and no debts so not in a bad place I think. I`m taking my workplace pension in just over 5 years. Not looking at this to rely on to keep my head above water just a bit of fun to see if I can keep my investments in the green or minimise the red as best I can. Since I`ve opened my T212 account and started I`m up 18% which is far better than the interest that I`d be getting in an ISA. Some investments have a couple of grand and some have £20 😂
Couple of things, all my personal experience.
I'm not cleverer than the market. I CBA to actively manage. Know thyself.
Small trades hurt, the fees will kill you.
Trackers are boring but with that dullness come the cheapest and most reliable spreads of investment going. Good times to buy? When world+dog has just sharted themselves. Like when the Orange Shitgibbon announces global tariffs. Etc. You only need a few crashes to get in quick after. Covid crash. The dot com crash. World bank crisis. Etc. You can read about these things in the news. You don't have to actively manage for them. They're macro events not micro. They're usually fairly damn obvious. They're listed on wikipedia. Minimum effort investment.
Also, I like gold.
At the moment I`ve 68 companies
£12 average trade cost in UK, so a quick calculation says you got scalped for £840 just to buy in and another £840 on the way out.
Tell me I'm wrong?
£12 average trade cost in UK, so a quick calculation says you got scalped for £840 just to buy in and another £840 on the way out.
That's exactly the point I was making on my earlier post:
Apart from anything else it's cheaper when you come to sell. [Funds versus individual shares]
And actually it's much worse when selling as you either have to sell in bigger chunks than you would want to, or get hit by huge absolute value fees or unbalance your portfolio.
For example, say I was currently retired and drawing down £2k pcm from my ISA to live on. I have shares in about 20 different pots. To sell a hundred pounds of each would be stupid, to sell a grands worth of each at the beginning of the year would lose opportunity, so I'll be left with picking one particular stock to decimate each month, which messes up the diversification.
A couple of observations biglee. First, my default advice would have been to buy tracking funds but seeing that last post it seems as though you have the right mindset for what you are doing - trying to have a bit of fun and doing a bit better than cash rather than expecting to become a millionaire or gambling with your last penny. Now look at that portfolio - you have more holdings in loss than profit and you have some ludicrously small holdings. Aim to get it down to no more than 10-20 positions by getting rid of all of the small holdings, and if you think a small holding is actually a really good idea, then buy more of it. For all positions set a stop loss limit of say 10% and that will help prevent the pile up of losing ideas.
to sell a grands worth of each at the beginning of the year would lose opportunity
Look up "dollar cost ravaging" - spreading your buying is good ("dollar cost averaging"), but spreading your buying is equally as bad. You're actually better off selling once and keeping the year's money in money-market fund while you spend it down.
For all positions set a stop loss limit of say 10% and that will help prevent the pile up of losing ideas.
And it would also kill many opportunities for making big gains. It's dangerous to make people think that StopLosses are a panacea.
If I'd had stop losses in my RR shares I'd have missed out on tens of thousands of profit.in fact the same could be said of BP, IAG Jet2 and most of my other high performers
For all positions set a stop loss limit of say 10% and that will help prevent the pile up of losing ideas.
-1 again.
Take the recent Trumpenomics, a 10% stop loss would have been triggered when the markets crashed, and you would have sold at the bottom, entirely missing them rebounding back to where they were. You would have lost 10% where everyone else broke even.
For all positions set a stop loss limit of say 10% and that will help prevent the pile up of losing ideas.
I'm reliably informed that if you're looking for things to go up quickly the blue pill is a better option.
The logical thing is a stop gain not a stop loss.
Shares go up and down, if you have a stop loss you will always sell below what you paid. Have a stop gain and you'll always sell at profit.
PS this is bobbins but so is stop loss as a principle.
As for 68 holdings, if you have enough money to make them all significant, that's fine. If the trading costs are more than 1% or so then you're hurting yourself.
Though to be fair even 2-3% in fees amortised over several years isn't really all that bad, so if you buy and hold for a decent period it's not necessarily that huge a problem.
to sell a grands worth of each at the beginning of the year would lose opportunity
Look up "dollar cost ravaging" - spreading your buying is good ("dollar cost averaging"), but spreading your buying is equally as bad. You're actually better off selling once and keeping the year's money in money-market fund while you spend it down.
I can’t make any sense of this. Can we have it again in simple terms? I’m needing to sell bits of my mums portfolio every few months and I’ve been wondering the best way to do it.
It's a minor detail of no consequence to you. Just find a cheap way of dealing and sell as you want to. If you have multiple holdings then it's probably more efficient to sell them fully, one at a time, rather than lots of bits of each.
Also, be aware of CGT issues.
Never wrong to take a profit (the stop gain) is a broker speak - they want you to trade. Run your winners is the mantra from successful fund managers, and one of the reasons they recount it is that over history the number of money making ideas is outweighed by the number of losing/average ideas.
If you have 68 positions in a portfolio you can’t make them all more significant positions without winning the lottery or discovering a different sort of money tree. The art of successful fund management isn’t just finding good ideas, it is about making sure you put more money into the best ideas and you junk losing ones (or you convince yourself to double down). That 68th holding by size is biglee’s 68th best idea, there are 67 better ideas within his own portfolio according to biglee, so surely he is better off taking the money in the 68th best idea and putting it to work in one of the others. The academic studies have consistently shown that when stock picking portfolios go over 20 holdings, the impact of extra holdings becomes so marginal as to be inconsequential.
At risk of pointing out the obvious, suggest everyone considers their employer's Share save/Sharepurchase schemes as the first port of call for investments.
Fair enough they were exceptional times, but I just cashed in my August 2020 SIP contribution....
The cost to my pay packet that month was about £87 and the value today was a frankly insane £1044. Mind blowing return
......
Rolls?
Rolls?
Nah. High Street Bank
But the key wins should apply regardless
- Tax free
- Matching contribution from employer
The fact that the shares also trebled in value was just a bonus
Would love to know if there is anyone on the forum in the RR SAYE 5 year scheme. They would have made an absolute mint. There was one empoyee that did post, but no idea if he is still in...
Ours is ticking along nicely but now so high you're not getting many shares per pay packet 🤷♂️
I like investment trusts for their rising income. They are a basket of shares and keep money back in a good year, draw it down in a bad.
They ll never set the world on fire, more a steady Eddie.
Merchants trust mrch yields c5.3% at today's price, tuck them away in an ISA and reinvest on the dips. Quarterly div.
My individual stocks have been hit and miss, bats, Brit American tobacco have rallied but only to 2017 prices.
Legal and general lgen yield 8%.
I like the comments section on advfn and LSE.
Nothing wrong with Merchants; that reserve of income is a very useful safety net.
Cheers yes it is, I wish I knew about investment trusts when I started. Cty city of London I started with but am now into merchants to diversify.
Cty have had a good run but look fully valued at 5 quid, yield c 4.2% so sold a few to buy merchants.
The added advantage which the likes of Hargreaves Lansdown don’t highlight anywhere near enough is that for HL’s fees an investment trust is (correctly) classified as a share and attracts a flat rate charge per holding per year whereas a unit trust will attract a % of holding value per year, which can be many multiples of that flat fee if the holding in the unit trust is of a size. And guess which type of savings vehicle HL spend most of their efforts promoting…..
Maybe I'm confused but a stocks and shares ISA is just a container where you don't pay tax on any gains.. You still take a hit on exchange rate depending on if the dollar is weak against the pound etc? and trading fees as applicable depending on what you buy and sell?
For example I have 2 Vanguard ETFs in my T212 s&s ISA
VWRP charges 0.22%
VEUA charges 0.1%
Both are traded in £ so I don't have to consider FX exchange rate, £ Vs $ Vs € if I decide to cash out.. It's already baked in. And I dont pay any fees other than the fund fees Vanguard charge as above
this is my 'fun' SS ISA. I have another one in a tracker. You can very much make money if you time the market right and buy sensibly. These stocks were bought at peak covid, when the whole market crashed. Similarly next time the we get a Truss moment or a Trump destabilisation I'll be having a few more flutters.
Sorry to point out the obvious DFT but that is clearly time in the market just as much as timing the market
My best from COVID are +900+% , +170% and +151% but I'm not stupid enough to think that is purely based on timing the market. COVID was 5 years ago FFS.
SharesInGoingUpInValueOverALongPeriodOfTimeshocker! 😉
I currently have 196% from ~6 weeks ago. Is that time in the market or timing the market? 😉 And half of that trade was sold at 415% 3 days ago.
In what sectors/countries are people seeing these gains? I'm finally in a position where I have something (very modest) to invest and an impending recession seems like the perfect time to get organised.
Good work Jamz, especially the bit you sold. Out of interest, how much of your total portfolio does that 450% represent.