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...)
This will put a few off stocks & shares no doubt
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.
