Investment & Investing

Check out the book 'Smarter Investing' by Tim Hale. Helped me get to grips with what I should be doing to not be an idiot with my S&S and it's helped me get a very satisfactory ROI so far.

how would you feel about losing 50% of you money - not saying it will happen but its a risk if you put all of your money in 2 individual stocks.

If you are looking at the stock market 4 thoughts
1: decide on your asset allocation model - you can find these for free by going onto the website of IFAs and playing with their models - broadly tell them how risk tolerant you are and they will suggest a portfolio. Do it on a couple of different websites to get an idea
2: the only thing you can control are the ongoing costs of your investments, which negatively impact your overal return. For small investors - say less than GBP 10,000 - I cannot see the reason for having actively managed investments.
3: Understand pound cost averaging and how it works for you.
4: You cannot time the market - if you could you would already be in front of a blomberg terminal, trading.

One of my favourite resources for this kind of discussion is http://thereformedbroker.com/

How much money have you got (you don't have to answer this) and what do you want to do with it? If you want to buy a house in the next couple of years, rather than leaving it in there long-term, you might do better with current accounts.

For example I have a setup thus:

1. Each payday I put a grand into a Nationwide account (Flexsomething) that gets 5% interest on 2,500
   
2. The next day I take the grand out and put it into a Santander 1-2-3 account, which gets 3% interest on a maximum of 20,000. This is also my current account.
   
3. Then I take the grand out and split it:
   
4. 200 into my partner's Help to Buy ISA (which gets 2% plus a 25% bonus when buying your first home), you can only pay in 200 a month
   
5. 500 into another Nationwide account (Flexicurity?) that gets 5%, but you can only pay in 500 a month.
   
6. 300 into a shared account of the above (my partner has the same setup and contributes into this account). This account gets cashback on the first 100's worth of contactless payments, so we do our food shopping from this account.
   
   

Leftovers and interest currently goes into my old Natwest account which gets 1%, so I need to find something better.

So we get 3% on most of our savings and 5% on a few grand more.

Of course fidbod actually seems to know his shit... you would be better off listening to him for anything longer-term than a couple of years. But the method I use gets reasonable returns immediately and you can take your money out at any time, so if you want to buy a house imminently it might be a better option.

The first question we need to answer is how long are you investing for? If you're thinking of buying a house within the next 5 years, then investing in the stock market is probably not a sensible move. Fundamentally, the benefits of investing in it are long term, i.e. greater than ten years, rather than short term.

I'm finding Nutmeg decent so far; stocks and shares ISA returning better than a cash ISA (think it's about 3.8% at the moment).

I don't have the time or knowledge to micro-manage investments so I'm judging it by ease of use as well as just returns.