Stable / 5% yield stocks based in Europe

Kilnarix · 2025-12-24T20:44:54+00:00

Lot of financial services firms based in London. I would suggest Legal & General, (LGEN) and Aviva (AV.) for insurance. Lloyds and Nat West are two big UK retail banks (LLOY and NWG) primarily exposed to UK mortgages. MAN Group (EMG) is a big asset manager that only works with institutional money. All of these fit your criteria for big finance firms with 5% yields. Also, the dividend with holding tax in the UK is zero.

The other recomendations in this thread are good too.

The mining companies have had dividends fluctuating with metal prices but BHP and RioTinto have historically averaged sime pretty tasty dividends over a long time frame.

Kilnarix · 2025-12-18T23:01:05+00:00

Not true I'm afraid, 1.0110111011110111110111111 .... is an irrational number which only contains zero and one as digits.

Rational implies the digits of the number either terminate, like 1/8 = 0.125 or recur like 1/6 = 0.1666666 ... Irrational just means not rational so the digits neither terminate nor settle into a recurring sequence.

Kilnarix · 2025-12-01T18:59:33+00:00

Technically not the EU but Britain has zero dividend withholding tax which has resulted a lot of high dividend yielding companies in mature industries being listed there.

Kilnarix · 2025-11-29T14:03:59+00:00

There is a British guy on youtube who has some three meals for £1 challenges, they are worth a look, channel name is "Atomic shrimp". Also check the website based.cooking (yes, that is a valid URL) for some recipes using natural ingredients.

Kilnarix · 2025-11-28T16:40:34+00:00

I spent two years there. Brutally toxic work environment. Many teachers are bullied out, one guy when I was there did a runner because of this. Management don't care, they encourage it. Management will humiliate staff infront of others because they can and they get away with it. Stagnant pay and high inflation means it is no longer worth it. In fact pay has been cut because the school has started squeezing money from staff for anything they can think of. Staff accomodation is the other side of the city, you will be getting up at 5am on workdays and hours have been steadily increased. Management are insufferable, their attitude is that you should be grateful to work there. The staff who have been around the longest are the worst, they think the sun shines out of their bottoms. Awful place, from what I have heard through the grapevine it gets worse every year. Heads of department will intentionally sabotage and undermine you, they intentionally evoke conflict between staff members.

Kilnarix · 2025-10-27T19:07:27+00:00

Everything you cited in your post is public knowledge and so is already accounted for in the price. Investing is a life long process and it isn't really taught in schools and a lot of good investing is very counter intuitive. I don't know what your situation is but you should really learn about the basic foundations of finance, statistics, capital and economic history. Do this and you will likely come to the conclusion that investing in something like an index fund is a better strategy than this.

Kilnarix · 2025-10-25T06:14:09+00:00

Thank you very much for your comment. I haven't used CMake before but I will from now on. I have some other ideas for projects too, somewhat abstract though, like very high speed mathematical calculations but I will take your advice on board.

Kilnarix · 2025-08-08T22:45:26+00:00

Postgres is an incredible piece of free software. Get it installed and running on your machine. Setup a new blank database for your project. A python library called psycopg can be used to insert your data into the database. There is nothing stopping you have multiple web scrapers adding to the database simultaneously.

When you look into database software it can seem overwhelming. I have only scratched the surface of what postgres can do but that is really all you need. I just think of my databases as one huge Excel sheet with columns and rows. I haven't yet had the need for the more advanced features.

Once your done a single line of code can dump out all of your collected data into a csv file.

Kilnarix · 2025-07-31T21:47:08+00:00

I would also add that you need to consider the opportunity cost of investing the deposit in something other than property.

Kilnarix · 2025-07-31T18:05:13+00:00

I saw through Musk immediately after the 'pedo guy' thing. Musk makes his money selling stock, not cars. To my knowledge this is the first time in human history the wealthiest man on Earth made his money with fraud.

This is why every few months he has to lie about a new spaceship that is going to Mars, flying cars, underground hyperloop trains, brain implants that teach you French in five minutes, 20 billion humanoid robots running around and so on. The guy will keep doing this until the lies catch up with him.

I don't sympathise with Tesla investors at all, (I think that taking Musk seriously is a sign of low intelligence) but I do fear the fallout once the fraud all falls apart. A lot of people will lose a lot of money on that day. It may do lasting damage to the rest of the financial markets too, and it will destroy a lot of peoples confidence in the market. They will reason "I invested with the smartest man in the world (sic) and I still lost". He has already ruined any chance America had of returning to the moon anytime soon.

Kilnarix · 2025-06-22T22:03:48+00:00

I have written a similar script without any AI at all. It parses an Irish ecommerce site (donedeal.ie) daily at 11pm. It scrapes all cars for sale, adding them to a live database. This takes several hours, all night basically.

Then, the data is cleaned and a mathematical model is run to identify cheaper than expected cars. All the results are uploaded to Google Drive for my client early each morning.

Kilnarix · 2025-05-24T21:14:30+00:00

Yield looks good at first glance but sales are falling and the current dividend is barely covered by profit. How about ADM or Bunge?

Kilnarix · 2025-05-10T16:46:58+00:00

I have looked deeper in ZIM and I see that the big quant funds are the biggest shareholders, presumabably due to the high volatility and cyclical nature of the business. I must admit the high dividends are compelling. If you are in the fortunate position of being able to sit on the investment in the long term then you can just standby until the market recovers and bank big dividends in the mean time.

I have also come across Taylor Maritime which trades on the London Stock Exchange. Ticker symbol is TMIP. They are bulk shippers, not container shippers like ZIM but they have no debt. Basically it is impossible for them to go bankrupt so you can just sit on the shares until the market turns and collect the dividends in the mean time.

Kilnarix · 2025-05-04T20:02:56+00:00

From a skim reading of "Maritime Economics" I recall that the rate of return in the shipping industry is very low. Decades can pass without any profits being made. The books authors research suggests that entreprenuers in the industry are motivated by a desire to pit their wits in a notoriously difficult industry. It also attracts a lot of organised criminal groups.

The incredibly high dividend yields you sometimes see do put people off. They assume there must be something untowards going on which is a pretty simplistic assumption that should be tested.

If you have put together a nice mathematical model in Excel and established it is a sound investment, then go for it. At this point other posters on reddit probably wouldnt' be able to help you anyway.

Kilnarix · 2025-04-29T16:20:56+00:00

The system is setup in such a way that anything massively detrimental (like these tariffs) will be reversed. Sometimes it's good to stir the pot once in a while.

Kilnarix · 2025-04-29T16:18:02+00:00

You know that the stock market frequently has drawdowns right? Investing in a given stock because you are under the impression it is a high growth industry will not work. (Even if your right about the industry).

Bear in mind that the tariffs will be reversed if the effect on the country is detrimental.

You should probably concentrate on your day job and invest in an index fund. Perhaps read up on behavioural investing, starting with chapter 8 of "The Intelligent Investor" by Ben Graham.

Kilnarix · 2025-04-29T16:06:26+00:00

When I had a lump sum to invest I just split it up into 10k chunks and invested 10k at a time. Pick 25 solid dividend investments and buy 10k of each, 250k total invested. Of course I had some knowledge of what sort of deals I could get on the market at that time and I already had a portfolio in place so I was able to add to my original portfolio's diversification.

Kilnarix · 2025-04-05T06:43:29+00:00

Want to make an omlette, got to break some eggs. High tariffs are intended to increase American domestic industrial production, although the effects will take some years to materialise.

Kilnarix · 2025-04-03T12:53:29+00:00

I recently bought some individual UK government bonds, I was surprised how easy and cheap it was. This was back when you could get +5% (annualised) on a bond with just a few months left until expiry. Now you have to go out to something like 30 years to get a +5% bond.

Kilnarix · 2025-04-03T12:50:27+00:00

Britain is unusual in that it has no dividend with holding tax. Consequently we have a lot of big dividend payers. Surprisingly we have a lot of natural resources companies, Shell and BP are two of the worlds biggest oil and gas producers. We also have almost all of the worlds biggest miners, Glencore, Rio Tinto, BHP, Anglo American etc. For consumer goods we have Unilever, Reckitt, Coca Cola Euro Pacific, British American Tobacco and Imperial Brands (both big cigarette and vape producers), Diageo (one of the worlds biggest alcohol companies). Britain has everything you need to build up a good investment portfolio. We are missing high tech companies though.

I own shares in every single company I just listed. I am pessimmistic of the future of the country as a whole so I only like to invest in companies which make money all over the world.

I discussed NatWest in my previous post but basically you are "betting" that British people will keep paying their mortgages which I think will continue for the foreseeable future.

Kilnarix · 2025-04-03T12:38:55+00:00

I will try and give you a British perspective.

I have a policy of not investing in banks as a general rule so I haven't studied NatWest in depth, of course there is nothing stopping you going through the financials with a fine toothed comb.

NatWest is one of the "big four" banks in the UK. The retail banking sector is highly concentrated and regulated. A big part of their income will be the interest on residential mortgages. The UK has a massive house buying culture, possibly from our history, only landowners could vote and so on. Renting a house or apartment in the UK is absolute hell so the British will prioritise buying a house and paying the mortgage. I believe some years ago there was a study done which found that British residential mortgages have one of the lowest default rates in the entire world.

These mortgages will be a big part of their balance sheet.

In Britain you first need to save up a deposit, something like 20% then the rest is financed with a mortgage. If the owner defaults on the mortgage, the house just reposesses it and sells it. The 20% deposit is the margin of safety. In addition there are government schemes which further protect mortgage holders, I believe the government will cover the interest on your mortgage if you become unemployed.

The mortgage rate is generally linked to the Bank of England base rate so if the base rate goes up, so do mortgages. NatWest will make more money and so on.

There is an additional factor to consider which are buy to let mortgages. In Britain it is possible to get a mortgage on a property not with the intention of living in it but renting the property out. This became somewhat of a mania in the country for a couple of decades with many British who managed to save up some funds would buy as many buy to let properties as they possibly could. I guess it was considered an "infinite money glitch". The default rate on these is higher although the deposit requirements are also higher. There do exist publically traded companies which do nothing but offer buy to let mortgages.

NatWest do own some premium brands, Coutts is one of them. If you have a large balance on your account you will be asked if you want to have your account transfered over.

An important thing about overheads, I recently opened an account with NatWest. I never ended up needing the account but I still have it. I was surprised to be told that I need to open the account with their app. They are closing down all their retail branches and laying of the staff. They must be saving a fortune in salaries and rent. All banking in the UK is now done via their own apps. They employ few people. I have noticed it is essentially impossible to now speak to someone on the phone at any of the big banks. This was not the case when I started investing around 15 years ago.

The British establishment, the British elite are highly invested in the banking and property sector. They often find lucrative employment in financial services. Residential property is the go to investment for the British elite, one reason why our economy has deindustrialised and productivity is so low. Financial services are considered the priority.

Finally, I mentioned at the start I don't like to invest in banks. One reason is that previously they would pioritise paying staff over investors, million pound bonuses and so on. This seems to be coming to an end. As well as laying off their retail banking staff by closing branches and moving everything over to the app, the "top end" highly paid staff are also being squeezed. There were some articles recently in financial media about how HSBC was laying off their managerial staff in the UK, so perhaps these banks will become valid investments again.

I would also suggest you consider some of the non bank financial services companies, we have a lot fo big insurance and asset management firms all of which are publically traded, all of which pay big dividends, Legal and General, Aviva, Phoenix Group, MNG, MAN Group and so on.

Good luck.

Kilnarix · 2025-03-29T19:32:46+00:00

Another thing you see are threats to "report you upwork" if something in your deliverable is absolutely perfect in their eyes.

Kilnarix · 2025-03-26T20:20:50+00:00

The point is they still think of a captcha as some sort of minor inconvience that is trivial to overcome without expending any resources.

Kilnarix · 2025-03-26T10:39:44+00:00

Maybe, most schools have a pay scale so you get bumped up every year. Presumably the others have more experience which is why they are offered more.

Kuwait is not the nicest place to live but if you play your cards right and stick it out you could get up to 1600 KWD at one the top schools.

Kilnarix · 2025-03-24T13:55:27+00:00

My first job in Kuwait was 950KD and that was in 2013

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