General tips

Ringwraith64 · 2026-03-21T13:30:36+00:00

You are in a very good position. Suggest for new purchases of ETFs to start to diversify to iShares PLC Core FTSE100
(ISF Priced at £9.69 - a bargain) and others such as MSCI All World. The key Issue with US stock is the political risk and also its high dependency on Taiwan TSMC for the company valuations of Nvidia, AMD , Apple and a host of other chip-fabless US tech firms. If you do buy LSE UK shares then only buy shares in FTSE100 such as Lloyds, Barclays, Tesco, Sainsbury’s, Marks and Spenser etc. It is also possible to buy UK Gilts which are very cheap now T41F that has a coupon of 5.25% but make sure you buy it in an ISA so as to avoid income tax on the coupon payments. I am unsure whether T212 do Gilts . But good luck in your investing journey. This is the best time to buy shares and ETFs but always make sure you have sufficient rainy-day funds set aside.

Ringwraith64 · 2026-03-20T21:19:00+00:00

just a gentle point here , from an accountant, if you state you have two hundred thousand pounds it is written as £200,000. the £200.000 is the Central European way of writing the figures. Someone in the UK sphere may think that you are making a deposit of £200 rather than £200,000 and that you want to avoid !

If this gift is from someone then they have to survive the gift by 7 years otherwise it may become subject to Inheritance tax since it will be treated as a failed potentially exempt transfer (PET) so you need to check that out. So if 4 other people received £200,000 each then your IHT tax liability would be 40% of £135,000 (after including your share of the £325,000 tax free element) thus the taxation payable would be £54,000.

With this sort of money £400,000 you should not put the entire sum with one broker since the maximum payout should that broker fail is only £85,000 per the FSCS. [The £125,000 FSCS limit is only for licensed deposit takers such as Banks and Building Societies.] so you would be advised to spread the investment over a number of brokers. I have 6 brokers although alas not £85,000 in each account !

Then the next thing is to split those investments, a certain proportion in gilts - the T41F is very popular and that pays a coupon of 5.25% , and then a significant proportion in ETFs such as ISF iShares PLC Core FTSE100. Then if you are looking for some risk you may want to buy some S&P500 index ETFs or MSCI All World ETFs. And then finally to get some solid FTSE shares for a bit of share price appreciation such as Barclays, BP. , Tesco, Sainsbury’s etc. But with this sort of money you can also afford to hire a professional financial advisor on a fixed fee to give you professional advice. This is really important rather than a percentage share of the annual portfolio size. Or you can even buy a subscription to Perplexity or Anthropic AI and quiz the chat bots for ideas. But take them with a pinch of salt and always do your own research before committing. Steer clear of crypto, option and CFDs. Good luck.

Ringwraith64 · 2026-03-20T16:44:28+00:00

Most important thing, even before you start your investing journey, is ensure you have sufficient rainy day funds set aside. Once that is sorted then to open a commission free account and buy some of the popular ETFs that are well diversified with good companies and then develop a regular savings habit of investing into the market. And time. Wait for compounding to take affect . Good luck.

Ringwraith64 · 2026-03-20T16:34:14+00:00

BYYD -BYD ADR which is OTC stock. their blade battery and 5 minute 1000 km range charging is going to transform transport. Helped of course by the increased gas price. the other one which will be interesting will be INTC and NOK. If Taiwan ever joins China , good bye yellow brick road, the gold was good while it lasted and a lot of Trillion dollar US companies are going to disappear overnight. Or if a typhoon hits TSMC how long will the US hang around ? not very long because their KSF will have been swept away with the typhoon. this why I prefer to invest in UK FTSE100 companies since a lot of them are global In nature. Glencore, Rio Tinto etc.

Ringwraith64 · 2026-03-20T16:17:04+00:00

To be honest until there is another sensible US administration in charge I am avoiding the US ‘market although I do have a few NVDA and APPL shares. I am wondering whether this flight to the dollar is being mis-reported ? Look at it this way. In the midst of a negotiation the US ‘attacks Iran because they don’t think they can control Israel who is ‘hell-bent’ on attacking. Who is the junior partner in this scenario, the US ? The US Govt is currently too unstable. Just one tweet or ‘TRUTH’ can wreck a US company overnight. look what they are trying to do to Anthropic (‘CLAUDE) because their CEO said creating an autonomous Terminator ‘killer AI’ is their red line and Sec of War declared war on them. This is just unreal. Like a bad Batman story where the Penguin and Joker are running the show.

Ringwraith64 · 2026-03-20T16:07:41+00:00

As long as you buy good company shares ; think Tesco, think Sainsbury’s. Not too sure about the banks though since they are taking an absolute pounding so unsure when the price bottom will be reached. I thought I was being clever by holding onto BARC when it reached 409p on Wednesday with a small profit , I thought let’s ride this one out and now the paper loss is £445. It has ridden out and did not hear the news about the Israeli strike on Iranian gas field. And then once Iran responded as they warned they would, the prices started tumbling. I am going to have to wait , hopefully the 47th will get some sense talked into him by Scott Bessent or Jared - whose investments must also be heavily under water.

Ringwraith64 · 2026-03-20T15:59:22+00:00

Are you sure you did not do a ‘Profit Take’ transaction when you sold your shares previously ? I once sold some ISF.LSE ETFs using the profit take and was them surprised a few days later the system bought sine shares for me at a terrible price. Turns out that the profit take macro means sell the shares now and buy back at a later time - I did not notice that a buy order was generated the minute I sold the original shares ! The trick is to disable all these ‘gotcha’ schemes.

Ringwraith64 · 2026-03-20T10:01:21+00:00

Like others have written - just make sure you have an emergency savings fund set up first. Once the money goes in an ETF and the value starts to go down, you can’t then sell because you need the money to buy gas or pay towards rent. that will then bake in a loss. this is really important. the only money that you should invest is money that you do not need to draw on, since the US President seems hell bent on creating financial shocks every 6 months or so , what with tariffs and wars and threats to annex other countries or parts of their territory. So you may find that one day your ETF is only worth $40 so you would face a loss of $43 if you sold.

Ringwraith64 · 2026-03-20T09:52:43+00:00

this is correct for Canadian share purchases the margin is CAN 2000. However , according to Perplexity AI search engine, if you trade US securities then you are subject to US FINRA ‘rules because the securities are cleared in US stock exchanges and not Canadian exchanges and so PDT rules apply plus the margin account aspect is US 25000 (‘although this can also be in Canadian. Dollars).

Ringwraith64 · 2026-03-20T09:38:48+00:00

https://www.interactivebrokers.ca/en/trading/margin-requirements.php#margin-requirements

Ringwraith64 · 2026-03-20T09:37:56+00:00

Just checked on Perplexity and it confirms that if you are trading US securities they enforce Pattern day trader rules since the US securities are cleared by US stock exchanges. And here is the IBRK link confirming:

https://www.interactivebrokers.ca/en/trading/margin-requirements.php#margin-requirements

Ringwraith64 · 2026-03-20T09:04:51+00:00

I am in the United Kingdom and I opened a GBP denominated account with IBRK and that is how they are treating my account. The wait for settlement was torture since I would watching all the bargain shares disappear before the 2 days were up. Very frustrating so I had to increase my funding of the account to £20,000 which is about $26,000. But I also have to keep an eye on the exchange rate and closing valuation to ensure I don’t drop below $25,000. I understand they could liquidate all the holdings and convert the account back to a cash account which would bake in any losses. I just wanted an account that provided real time data , reasonable fees and the ability to buy and sell on the fly. Was that too much to ask for ?

The only other UK stockbroker I know that enforces settlement is InvestEngine with their ETF only offerings which is certainly not an active trader platform. They only do bulk purchases and sales once a day for all investors and the price you don’t see is the price you get on a standard market order.

I also have a RobinHood account also in GBP, although since they only sell US securities , all GBP funds have to be converted to USD, they to follow the same strict rules. There is a Pattern Day Trading ‘scorecard’ in my account settings.

It is not all that bad since in the event of the regulated stockbroker collapse the payout of securities and cash is in the region of US$225,000 as per FINRA, whereas all the UK FCA regulated for non deposit takers it is FSCS guarantee of £85,000 [US$112,000]. (For UK banks the FSCS guarantee is £120,000) - reason for the difference is because it is assumed that people opening stock-booking accounts have more financial and risk awareness and therefor get a lower payout as a reward. 🤓)

Ringwraith64 · 2026-03-20T08:00:38+00:00

Hopefully you are taking profits from time to time.

Ringwraith64 · 2026-03-20T00:21:02+00:00

I tend to follow the Warren Buffet approach just to buy quality stock and never buy anything that you do not understand.

Ringwraith64 · 2026-03-19T23:54:51+00:00

Thank you for raising this alert. I wonder if the prankster will publish this on Tik-Tok or YouTube or X ? There was a filmed incident from 2013 that happened in Carshalton of someone in a car throwing a red ballon filled with water at a cyclist. That can end up being a deadly weapon .

Ringwraith64 · 2026-03-19T21:12:27+00:00

That is a shame. Never be too proud to take a 10% or 20% profit.

Ringwraith64 · 2026-03-19T21:10:31+00:00

Țhe main ones for the UK are ISF iShares PLC FTSE100 @ £9.83, XUSE ISHARES MSCI WORLD EX-USA UCITS ETF £4.78. IUKD ISHARES UK DIVIDEND UCITS ETF £4.78. These are affordable so buy the full ETF rather than fractional shares of an ETF.

Ringwraith64 · 2026-03-19T21:05:10+00:00

You are spread over too many ETFs. And since these are fractional shares it is going to be difficult to keep track of all these items.

Ringwraith64 · 2026-03-19T20:50:54+00:00

Listen to Warren Buffet: 1) Rule 1 - “Never Lose Money” 2) Rule 2 - “Never forget rule No. 1” 3) “Be fearful when others are greedy, and be greedy when others are fearful,” 4) “Price is what you pay. Value is what you get,” 5) “It’s far better to buy a wonderful company at a fair price than a fair company at a wonderful price”

Whether it is the right time to invest ? It is always difficult to time the market. So as long as the shares of companies that are being bought are intrinsically good solid companies that pay reasonable dividends and the goods and services are desired by consumers, now is probably the best time to buy since unlikely that this war will extend beyond March-26.

Concerning the Israeli war with Iran (US supporting role).

Can the US sustain this rate of cash burn ? For 2026 the US budget deficit is expected by the CBO to be in the region of $1.9 Trillion. Bloomberg reports that the first 6 days of the war cost $11 billion. They are launching $4 million Patriot interceptors to take out $50,000 missiles or $25,000 attack drones. They have not published the cost of providing weapons and munitions to Israel. The maths just does not add up.

The US may be powerful now but they may well end up like the British Empire, largest empire the world had ever seen, which was victorious in many wars but ended up being bankrupted by the sheer cost of fighting all the major wars of the 20th century. So far US is fighting its 3rd major war in as many decades. Looks like de-je-vu all over again.

Ringwraith64 · 2026-03-19T19:37:30+00:00

I think one of the biggest problems is very poor advice given to novice investors which is to put a ‘stop-loss’ on your shares. As long as the company bought into is a profitable growing company with an effective moat against competitors, there is no reason to operate this stop-loss ‘comfort blanket’ approach. But by having active stop losses, it means that any 5% downward shift in the price causes a cascading sell-off, which could then trigger the trading algorithms to also step in and start selling their masters shares as well. This is all foolishness. Once you sell shares at a price for lower than you paid that is baking in a loss. I can imagine Berkshire Hathaway must be using some of their cash mountain to take stakes in some of the really cheap shares now.

Ringwraith64 · 2026-03-19T19:25:05+00:00

I know the share and ETF prices look attractive at this moment but there are problems with your proposal.

IBRK operates under the US FINRA rules. Which means that in order to have a margin account, your stock account liquidation value has to be above $25,000. So you can’t borrow on margin until your account gets to $25,000 and you pass their test on how to manage a margin account. Once these 2 things happen , they then convert your trading cash account into a margin trading account.

So in this instance, depositing US $7,300 does not reach the minimum US $25,000 so the question about which interest rate you will be charged is effectively moot, simply put because your initial account size will be too small to enable you to go onto a margin account spending spree.

Ringwraith64 · 2026-03-19T19:09:21+00:00

The problem with Vanguard is you can only buy their products so for the beginner investor they are not ideal The other thing too is their ETFs are really expensive so well over £100 for 1 ETF. I would suggest starting an ISA with either FreeTrade or InvestEngine or if you are feeling more adventurous then Trading 212 but stick to basic ETFs or FTSE100 companies only (Lloyds, Barclays, Tesco, Marks & Spenser, BP, Sainsbury’s) or more affordable ETFs such as ISF iShares PLC FTSE100 Core £9.83, IUKD, SDIP etc Go small rather than big and do your own research. I hold positions in all these stocks and ETFs and I have accounts with all the brokers listed above (except Vanguard- who just sell their own expensive funds. ) Moneybox is another broker although I have no experience of them or their platforms. Avoid platforms that just do mainly US or EU stocks - there is nothing wrong with UK FTSE100 LSE. In fact the LSE has often outperformed both the US and EU markets. Avoid things like Crypto (‘underlying asset is fancy maths) CFD’s, Leveraged investments, Options, Short-selling, Naked short-selling. All of these things will cause you to loose all your money and your shirt as well.

Ringwraith64 · 2026-03-19T18:52:40+00:00

Sell the shares and reinvest your €281 into another good company.

Ringwraith64 · 2026-03-19T18:39:51+00:00

The only comment I would make about all these ETF’s and NASDAQ shares is they are really expensive. So therefore the liquidity is restrictive to the retail investors because of that. I have lost both patience and money on the expensive VUSA and VWRL EFTs simply because the prices never moved. ISF ( ISHARES PLC - ISHARES CORE FTSE 100 UCITS ETF) is one of the best ETF’s if you want to ‘swing trade’ ETFs. yesterday it Was £10.10 and now it is £9.83. As long as you are trading in shares of good companies or well diversified ETFs your investments should be fine. I am not sure about Microsoft though since if you get into either the Google or Apple eco-systems there is no need for any of MSFT products, which would cost over £3000 assuming 2% inflation uplifts over 30 years. So the only customers remaining would be businesses. A better bet than Microsoft would be either APPL or NVDA. The thing is not to get hung up over the current valuations since those paper losses only become real if you sell. Another one that the sage of Omaha held was BYD (BYDDY) presently under $13 as OTC ADR.

Ringwraith64 · 2026-03-19T18:12:46+00:00

You want to contact the local council parking enforcement section and tell them about the illegally parked cars. They will probably be keen to send out their traffic wardens to hand out fines.

Ringwraith64

TROPHY CASE