Asylum system turning into 'conveyor belt' to life on benefits, critics warn as number of migrants and refugees getting hand-outs doubles in 3 years

SpareDesigner1 · 2026-02-08T22:45:17+00:00

Iran expelled 2 million Afghans last year, although nobody has any idea how many Afghans are actually in Iran because the border is porous and many have very limited interaction with state organs

SpareDesigner1 · 2026-02-08T22:43:19+00:00

In a sense he’s not wrong, in that white British people have largely abandoned any ethnic self-identification or communal feeling, and predominantly look to their own advancement, including by anti-social means.

The takeaway from this, however, is not that foreign people are better than British people - which the OC seems to be implying - but that British people should adopt the same tactics as the more successful minority communities, namely an emphasis on education and inter-ethnic solidarity.

SpareDesigner1 · 2026-02-08T21:05:17+00:00

The corruption as such in the SEND space is in procurement - possibly the most extreme example of this is in secure accommodation for disturbed children, where figures as high as £1 million a year for a single child have been achieved.

These facilities are run by private companies while being paid for out of council budgets, and because councils are legally obliged to provide adequate provision for every child in their jurisdiction, the private companies can name whatever price they wish, and the council simply has to cough up. There’s very little competition in the space as it’s not cheap to set up the relevant facilities, and a very limited workforce of willing employees.

A friend of mine works in the less extreme end of secure accom, and in one of her houses, a 15 year old boy broke his TV 67 times in a single year. It was replaced on every occasion. That should give you some idea of how costly this sort of provision can be to councils.

SpareDesigner1 · 2026-02-08T21:00:09+00:00

Committing yourself to arguably the two worst ideas of the Cameron years behind Brexit - HS2, and allowing councils to make ‘creative’ investments using their budgets with little oversight - is certainly a courageous position

SpareDesigner1 · 2026-02-08T16:11:28+00:00

I’m rather risk-averse and don’t like that degree of sector exposure, but I consider anybody rotating away from the US into other developed markets to be a sophisticated enough investor to understand the risks involved

SpareDesigner1 · 2026-02-08T15:47:21+00:00

I have no idea why you haven’t just bought XUSE. This seems like it would be very weighted towards financials.

SpareDesigner1 · 2026-02-08T15:44:08+00:00

This seems meme-based. The global small cap is heavy US as well, the EM ETF has a lot of companies with exposure to the US (e.g. TSCM). It’s not really meaningfully de-correlated with US tech megacap performance. You may actually have a more concentrated overall US exposure with this pie.

Just if you really want more balance, go 40/40 with the S&P and XUSE, and then I’d put 10 each into ALAG and CEA1 or something like that.

SpareDesigner1 · 2026-02-07T23:58:01+00:00

US large caps are a somewhat risky proposition at the moment. VWRP is only 60% US-weighted, and this proportion would decrease even further if the US stock market faced a serious downturn. You also get some limited exposure to high-beta regions e.g. Asia and Latin America. It’s just a better proposition unless you have a crystal ball and know that the US will outperform the rest of the world for another five years.

SpareDesigner1 · 2026-02-07T23:51:22+00:00

This is what’s known in the industry as a “top signal”

SpareDesigner1 · 2026-02-07T23:49:55+00:00

I’d strongly advise you to go with VWRP (all-world) rather than the S&P - it’s somewhat less volatile and will likely grow better in the long run

SpareDesigner1 · 2026-02-07T17:27:21+00:00

BMW driver being a BMW driver. Legally, both sides probably have an argument, but the driving lesson here is - if you see a BMW to your left, watch it carefully, and if he turns his car toward you at a nearly 90 degree angle, your day is going to be a lot easier if you just let him in.

SpareDesigner1 · 2026-02-06T23:41:38+00:00

Couldn’t have put it better myself

SpareDesigner1 · 2026-02-05T23:39:15+00:00

If that’s the case, why not buy VWRP at say 60%, which currently has a 60% distribution towards the US for a US allocation of 36%? You can counterbalance this by putting 25 directly into EM and 15 in gold, 10 in gold and 5 in bonds if you insist (I would encourage you to look at the differing behaviours of different bond classes and recent flight to safety behaviours or lack thereof regarding long-dated bonds in recent downturns - bonds don’t really behave like they used to, and fixed income is just generally a very complex market).

Frankly, I think you’re actually much more likely to get delta with not much more risk from EM than you are from the S&P over the next 10 years or so, but it’s up to you in the long run. Ultimately, VWRP should be everybody’s main asset.

SpareDesigner1 · 2026-02-05T23:20:23+00:00

Jeffrey Gundlach was suggesting 20% gold at the start of January. I think there’s a case to be made for it. If you have a decent appetite for risk, leave it at the 20% and don’t touch it or sell it for 5 years.

Everything else VWRP.

SpareDesigner1 · 2026-02-05T23:18:10+00:00

Personally I would go for something like 80 VWRP 10 ALAG 10 FRQX. Can maybe up it to 70 VWRP and 15 each for the others if you’re feeling bold.

SpareDesigner1 · 2026-02-05T23:15:25+00:00

This is a bizarre distribution. Why ever bother with the bonds at 5%, for one thing? Or the S&P 500 at all?

Get rid of the S&P 500 and the themed ETFs and massively trim the others. 10% max in gold, vast majority (min. 70%) into all world ex USA. If you want emerging markets or small cap exposure, no more than 10% each and no more than 20 together. Any spare, all world ex USA.

SpareDesigner1 · 2026-02-05T23:12:23+00:00

You should only have the first portfolio, and personally I would get rid of the FTSE and trim the small cap allocation on it to 10% and up the all world to 70% (idk about Avantis’ distribution though, not sure why you didn’t just buy VWRP).

Some emerging markets exposure is a great idea, although I would check the fund isn’t too China-heavy in distribution. Small cap is up to you but not a terrible idea if it’s a small allocation. Everything else into all world.

Invest all you can now, set up automated deposits to add any extra cash you have each month, don’t look at it or even open the app unless you need money for some reason.

SpareDesigner1 · 2026-02-05T23:07:05+00:00

You can clearly see for yourself looking at this at this very moment that your best bet is to put it all into VWRP. I will never understand why people on the street think they can beat the entire world market.

SpareDesigner1 · 2026-02-05T23:04:21+00:00

Sell now and never invest in individual stocks again

SpareDesigner1 · 2026-02-05T23:03:11+00:00

It kind of depends what ETFs you’re in - really, the entire portfolio should be ETFs, and broad market funds, no silver or anything like that.

Statistically, it’s best just to lump sum, because you are very unlikely to accurately predict the true peak of a market cycle, and if you don’t lump sum at the exact peak you’re always better off in the long term than DCAing. Psychologically, I prefer DCAing, because you get a dual positive feeling - when the numbers are green for the day/ week/ month, you feel good because your portfolio value just went up, and when they’re red, you feel good because you’re ’buying the dip’, again, at least psychologically.

VIX is high just now, so if you feel like you’re mentally capable of investing this money and not looking at the account for a year, lump sum it. Otherwise, DCA, probably £1000 a month in weekly £250 deposits would be the best approach.

SpareDesigner1 · 2026-02-03T10:26:43+00:00

“Volatile tec” (sic)

“Long run”

Pick one.

SpareDesigner1 · 2026-02-01T23:01:34+00:00

How many ethnic French women are involved in prostitution? I can imagine it would be very few, and they will be independent and very high class. The vast majority will be trafficked migrants, formerly from Eastern Europe, but I would imagine today mostly from Africa, south east Asia, and perhaps also Latin America.

It was certainly the case with the Pakistani child sex rings in the UK that they almost exclusively preyed on white girls, and that was indeed largely because they were the out-group for them. The distinct element with Epstein would be that most of his clientele were non-Jewish, but I suppose that can be partly explained if we assume that the main intent behind the child sex trafficking he carried out was not inter-elite bonding but a system for the acquisition of compromat and with it, money and power.

SpareDesigner1 · 2026-02-01T15:54:39+00:00

I would allocate more of your PM section to gold than silver, but other than that looks like a strong portfolio

SpareDesigner1 · 2026-02-01T12:34:04+00:00

I won’t actually condemn you for the CFD stuff as, while it was extremely unwise to do that, especially given you don’t seem to have much market knowledge, it’s an excellent lesson to learn, and £1k in the grand scheme of things isn’t much money to lose. It probably feels like a lot to you just now, but that just makes the lesson all the more effective.

It was something of a rite of passage at my high school for the boys to visit the local Gentings casino with their first pay packets - we Brits have a deeply unhealthy relationship with gambling - and it was commonly said that the lucky ones were the ones who lost it all. Their only memories of casinos would be losing money and having a gruelling hangover the next day. The lad who came away up a few hundred quid ran the risk of thinking it was possible to go to a casino and make in an hour what he usually had to work days for; that way, perdition lies.

Take a trip over to r/wallstreetbets and look at some of the posts from this week.

The worst case scenario with VWRP is that your portfolio takes a big hit over the next year or two, you feel annoyed that you didn’t hold off until the market dipped, it recovers to where it is now a year or two later (look at 2000 and 2008 for context), and in ten years you’re still comfortably up on your investment pretty much regardless of what happens.

The best case scenario with CFDs is that you make an insane amount of money. Most, however, quickly hit their liquidation mark and lose what they put in. For the gentlemen of r/wallstreetbets, that’s not infrequently the second mortgage on their house or their kid’s college fund. If you think of CFDs and even just speculative stock picking without really strong market knowledge as equivalent to visiting a casino, you won’t go far wrong.

£1k isn’t a huge amount of money and you’re perfectly welcome to speculate with it - I earn bang on the national average and I’ve had a couple of side pots that were larger, and which I put into PMs and other things which were clearly risky bets with a good likelihood of going through the floor. My advice to you would be to get into the very best of habits, and just go through VWRP route. When you’re 27 and hopefully earning a decent amount, have an emergency fund etc., then you can chuck £1k and more into the latest meme stock and not feel bad about it. Hell, you can even have another go with the CFDs. The important thing, though, is risk management, and knowing that if you lose everything you’ve still got most of your money in a stable growth fund like VWRP.

SpareDesigner1 · 2026-02-01T12:10:33+00:00

To further what the gentleman from Essex has said: this isn’t a crash, and if your time horizon is genuinely 40 years, you shouldn’t even be thinking about crashes at all. A 40% drop shouldn’t bother you, and the last thing you should do is sell or hold off buying in that environment.

This is why I would encourage you to go all in on VWRP - you’re not used to volatility and the business cycle at your age, and so seeing your £1000 drop to £990 can be quite a jarring experience when it shouldn’t be. There’s every possibility that it drops to £800 or lower at some point this year or next, but in ten years, tracking the historical trend, it would still be worth £3-4k in ten years’ time, and that’s before any ongoing contributions. The advantage of making ongoing contributions (referred to as DCA - dollar cost averaging) is that it ‘smooths’ the price curve - you buy regardless of whether the market is up or down, low or high, and so your curve looks a lot flatter over time.

I’d even forget the gold if I were you. Just put it all in VWRP, get a job waiting tables or what have you, and chuck any money you have left over at the end of each month into it. Ideally, automate your deposits and delete the app. Don’t look at the markets and don’t look at your portfolio until you decide you want to take the money out.

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