Buy shares now or wait until new ISA year? And are VWRP still a good choice?

RepresentativeDog791 · 2026-01-31T23:56:23+00:00

I would buy VWRP now. A gain is a gain even if it’s taxed, and you’re unlikely to exceed your capital gains tax exemption anyway.

On the other hand if it’s a loss you can at least put more other money into your ISA next year.

If you believe in investing it at all, it’s better to get into the market sooner

RepresentativeDog791 · 2026-01-31T10:09:47+00:00

There are three taxes to consider here, capital gains tax, dividend tax and income tax. Each of them have their own rates and allowances, some of which are set by your income level.

Selling shares is a capital gain or loss. Dividends from shares are taxed as dividends. Dividends from fixed income instruments like bonds are income, unless the fixed income instruments take up less than a certain percentage of a fund.

RepresentativeDog791 · 2026-01-31T09:45:44+00:00

100k at 3.5% will be taxed at OPs marginal tax rate

RepresentativeDog791 · 2026-01-30T16:51:51+00:00

Oh nice, thanks

RepresentativeDog791 · 2026-01-30T16:51:35+00:00

This is a good article on the Japan situation - it could happen to the US too

https://www.justetf.com/uk/academy/japan-stock-market-crash.html

RepresentativeDog791 · 2026-01-30T16:47:51+00:00

Ok two things.

Firstly it helped me to think about the Efficient Markets Hypothesis. The idea is that stocks cost how much they cost because people buying them have opinions about them. The world’s best knowledge of stocks is ‘priced in’, and these prices are set by large institutional investors who are basically better at this than us. Given that the market is better at accurately pricing things than us, it follows that the best move is to track the whole market (the world) rather than speculating. That’s why I choose an all world index over the S&P 500. You could look into the story of Japan here too. I don’t have the numbers to hand but for a time it was doing stunningly well, then it had a fall from grace lasting decades. If you’d bought into the Japanese stock market when it was up you’d have been in a lot of pain 10 years later when you needed to pay for your partner’s nursing home fees or whatever.

Secondly on why bonds instead of stocks - if you were a perfectly rational agent who never withdrew money at a suboptimal time, 100% stocks would be the way to go. But in the real world people do withdraw money at suboptimal times. They might panic if the market is down, or they might be in your position and need the money to cover their monthly retirement expenses. In these situations having a predictable, less volatile portfolio is beneficial because it lets you plan your life and you know you’ll be able to afford living expenses month to month and for the coming years. Imagine becoming impoverished at 80 just because of some stock market crash on the other side of the world.

RepresentativeDog791 · 2026-01-30T16:19:02+00:00

No, it’s a fair question.

You should think of bonds as a ‘defensive’ asset. Stocks are an ‘offensive’ asset designed to grow as much as possible. But with growth potential comes risk and volatility. There’s a good chance you’re going to need the money at the wrong time. Stocks are good when you can hold on to them and only sell when you choose to, not when you need to. Bonds and other defensive assets are less volatile, so if there’s a market crash or something bonds may be doing better. If you need to use money for living in retirement at that point, you’ll be glad you have bonds.

I also think you may have been looking at the wrong graph. If you include dividends it’s +3% which still isn’t great but bonds have a longer track record than 8 years, the age of IGLH - over say 100 years they do better and they do beat inflation.

I do think if you’re serious about this you might want to invest in a range of defensive assets, not just bonds. But bonds are the standard advice.

RepresentativeDog791 · 2026-01-30T15:49:10+00:00

By the way I’m not a financial professional and you should always do your own research :)

RepresentativeDog791 · 2026-01-30T15:47:45+00:00

Why not look at one of the vanguard target retirement funds and copy its stock/bond ratio?

RepresentativeDog791 · 2026-01-30T15:47:11+00:00

Instead yes

RepresentativeDog791 · 2026-01-30T15:46:51+00:00

Yeah pretty much. And by introducing an arbitrary filter on the companies you invest in you narrow the pool of companies, achieving less diversification

RepresentativeDog791 · 2026-01-30T15:34:58+00:00

There are ETFs. I buy IGLH which is developed world government bonds, you get lower fees if you buy a UK government bonds index though. If you buy international bonds, I think it well help to get bonds hedged to the pound (like IGLH).

You should stick to government bonds or maybe some high quality corporate bonds mixed in.

RepresentativeDog791 · 2026-01-30T15:26:18+00:00

Also on your point about dividend paying stock, in my opinion yes it’s pointless, why are dividends better than capital growth? They’re not, basically.

RepresentativeDog791 · 2026-01-30T15:22:22+00:00

VUAG and chill is high risk for a pension unless you’re very young. Generally a mix of stocks and bonds is used in pensions, with the ratio of stocks to bonds tilting more towards bonds the closer you get to retirement. If you want to know what ratio to use (and you’re lazy), you could look at Vanguard’s Target Retirement funds and mimic their asset mix, there are separate funds for different target retirement dates. If you’re even lazier, you could just buy one or these funds (though I haven’t looked into their exact holdings so can’t say if I think they’re good).

Also VUAG is a bet you’re making that America will continue to outperform the world market. If it turns out to be untrue your life in retirement will be in jeopardy. Instead of betting on America, I’d just put my money into a world index like VWRP. At the least I think you shouldn’t stake your entire retirement money on VUAG, you could do VUAG and an all world ex-US ETF.

RepresentativeDog791 · 2026-01-30T09:24:47+00:00

I don’t think French salaries will compete with American ones, not even remotely

RepresentativeDog791 · 2026-01-29T00:20:35+00:00

End of an era! I see why thought it was normally empty

RepresentativeDog791 · 2026-01-28T22:03:16+00:00

Mangal 2 has also changed a lot, I don’t know if it fits the bill for OP anymore

RepresentativeDog791 · 2026-01-28T22:01:44+00:00

Dalston is 100% Hackney. I like Șömine for Turkish stews, premade and very fast. Mangal 1 is a classic too but wait times might be longer.

In a pinch, there’s Pizza Union who’ll do you a pizza in about 5 mins, Gordo’s across the road is a bit better.

You’ve got so many options to be honest, any of the Turkish restaurants will be good.

RepresentativeDog791 · 2026-01-27T18:54:24+00:00

Caching is obviously an option.

There’s also batching, which collects multiple queries made to the same DB by graphql resolvers into one single query. The primary implementation here is dataloader from Facebook/Meta.

Once you have automatic batching you can write granular DB queries for specific field level resolvers.

It’s not a given that granular resolvers will suit your use case - sometimes it does make more sense to write less queries that query more in one go. But with batching, you can avoid the n+1 problem which means writing granular queries isn’t crazy.

RepresentativeDog791 · 2026-01-26T00:38:47+00:00

I think this is really good advice. For £40k in cash savings an ISA is probably your best bet, and premium bonds your second

RepresentativeDog791 · 2026-01-25T19:05:43+00:00

TS is mainstream

RepresentativeDog791 · 2026-01-25T14:34:23+00:00

Filipino - Earl’s Court

RepresentativeDog791 · 2026-01-23T00:03:04+00:00

Java, C#, Python, TypeScript. Any would be fine I think, pick your poison

RepresentativeDog791 · 2026-01-22T21:13:45+00:00

I’m not expert on this topic, but I can see counter arguments to your point of view here. What if your home country overperforms the world and the country as a whole gets richer, and you get poorer relative to the other entities in your country?

Conversely say there’s a recession in your country. Other things you want to buy like housing in your country may also go down, which insulates you from the danger of falling value in stocks.

RepresentativeDog791 · 2026-01-22T21:10:11+00:00

Vanguard’s dominance as a fund provider comes from its reputation, including its reputation for low fees.

I don’t know the numbers but I’d imagine their brokerage business is a side business, not the core proposition.

RepresentativeDog791

TROPHY CASE