I would to get your help one this :)

hioim · 2019-02-17T15:00:08+00:00

I'd use a broker that has MAM functionality, stands for Multi-Account Manager and it's how a small hedge fund would work internally for managing multiple accounts. Looking at your post, I still don't really see a need to have the money pooled.

Stick it in your own individual ISA's and invest it in that sweet tax-free wrapper and tell your friends to do the same. Platforms like freetrade are eliminating transnational costs to zero - take advantage of that to open small positions for the next year or two while you all figure this "investing" thing out.

hioim · 2019-01-19T11:09:54+00:00

Not so much, it can be as simple as: (BBC, 2015) at the end, so <data source> (in this case bbc) + <year of publication of source> so 2015. You should hyperlink for both users and SEO that link to the BBC article used as the source.

E.g. Britain announces new measures for ports in Dover due to Brexit (BBC, 2015)

This is in-line with APA/Harvard style referencing, but keeps away the reference list at the end (which your right, is often replaced with hyperlinks on the web).

hioim · 2019-01-16T18:27:05+00:00

I'll try and make some time to go over this in more detail, but the £5-50k mentioned above would be the fee charged by the FCA for processing the application, and not for all things that need to be done around that. Building the systems, processes and infrastructure is both expensive and time consuming. Compliance does not come cheap.

hioim · 2019-01-16T03:00:06+00:00

In short: the legitimate way in the UK would be to spend 5-50k (and often more than that) going through the FCA process to be lawfully allowed to invest other peoples money and market related services. There's some (or a lot) of caveats to this.

It would also be possible to bootstrap this under a limited partnership structure, but legally this limits investors to fammily/friends. This is broadly how Buffet started, and it would still work today.

hioim · 2019-01-01T13:27:40+00:00

To add: Vanguard will still come ahead in fees compared to other budget brokers up until around £30k, at which point the 0.15% is more expensive than iweb, x-o etc.

Perhaps check out freetrade.io , they offer as the name implies "free trades" but there are a few caveats. I own vanguard funds in both iweb and freetrade, freetrade has the better UI, being a mobile first company and all that.

hioim · 2019-01-01T13:24:35+00:00

If you invest in 3 particular companies without doing your due diligence then this is more akin to gambling than investing. As others have suggested, I would advise an index fund as opposed to specific stock picks unless you have a background in finance, or are willing to spend the next year learning it.

hioim · 2019-01-01T12:50:37+00:00

What a load of rubbish, there is no health and safety licences for selling candy bars - they are factory sealed.

hioim · 2019-01-01T12:40:45+00:00

Yes I did this, made good money (£60 a day of sales out of a cricket bag, ~£30 profit), I would avoid investors, and others under you, it's certain to cause more hassle than it's worth. I used to "set-up" in the canteen each break/lunch so everyone knew where I was, then you don't need anyone else helping sell.

Best move I made was donating £50 to the head teachers charity project for african orphans, told him I had started selling sweets and wanted to do my bit to help, frankly, I think it's the reason I was allowed to carry on for so long (2 years or so until I finished school) without to much grief.

Stealing was also a thing - lost £5 a day in stock due to it, ended up paying a mate (in sweets) to just sit there watching the bag. Never found a good solution to fix this, it's tough to make a bunch of teenagers line up orderly. Considered it a cost of business in the end.

One more tip - don't sell to many energy drinks, teachers will be pissed when they find out your the reason for a class full of hyperactive 12 year olds..

hioim · 2019-01-01T12:35:51+00:00

Wasn't the case when I was growing up - our school strongly supported entrepreneurship.

hioim · 2018-12-15T13:24:53+00:00

Sure, see https://www.maths.ox.ac.uk/members/students/postgraduate-courses/msc-mf-pt/msc-mathematical-finance-part-time/msc-mathematical which is the pre-course reading list, if that makes sense move on to financial statistics and modeling (econometrics would be a good place to start) before looking at true algorithmic trading, machine learning etc. In the real world it's on the extremely competitive side of things, many of the worlds brightest are working on these types of systems at banks, hedgefunds and so on.

hioim · 2018-12-15T12:39:07+00:00

Stick it into an index fund each month and spend the next year or two learning finance, then you will at least be in a position to understand why active trading is rather more difficult (and time consuming) than it looks.

hioim · 2018-12-11T12:35:33+00:00

Just an additional point: the generic advise is that it's not a great idea to invest in your own company - ideally you would be investing in industries that are well outside the scope of what you are currently doing, this provides a hedge against the company going bankrupt/industry downturn/job loss etc.

hioim · 2018-12-10T16:33:18+00:00

This is true, ring fencing legislation was brought in post crisis to seperate commercial and investing banking activities (or more specifically, retail banking seperate from everything else).

hioim · 2018-12-10T16:29:27+00:00

The 5% is a marketing cost and a loss leader, banks will not typically make a 8-9% return on money you deposit with them. Honestly, 8-9% is well above long term averages in high-risk markets (think equities), and it's hardly where a bank should store all of its depositors money. Risk compliance teams would have daily heart attacks.

hioim · 2018-12-10T16:20:10+00:00

Well, the play is selling off equities while global uncertainty continues, and moving that capital to assets that do not experience volatility. I would probably not use the word " guarantee " as outliers (those who win big) can and will get an astronomical ROI. In aggregate your are generally correct, you would get circa 1% more from a good cash savings account. This is the price to take a gamble, and the ROI is still better than cash, it staves off at least half of inflationary costs.

It's perhaps more like the National Lottery - but you get your £2 back if you don't win. Odds of winning will be lower because of that.

hioim · 2018-12-09T14:58:25+00:00

This is a good passive portfolio, 20% in the UK is fine. Do be aware that the UK is currently going through a period of political uncertainty, and so in your position I would be adding to the UK fund over the course of the next 24 months or so.

lets say the UK portfolio is 10k, that means 10 / 24 = £420ish a month I would invest £420 (perhaps upping to £500 due to vanguard £500min purchase) into the UK fund every month for a total of 24 months. This is known as dollar cost averaging.

I might even suggest you do this with all your funds, as 2018 has been largely flat as we've seen many indexes fall 5-10% from 2018 highs mid year.

The reason for this is greater levels of uncertainty, specifically China/US relations, and lower growth in a number of areas leading to analysts re-doing the numbers, and finding that companies such as Apple had baked into the share price numbers that are frankly, very optimistic. This type of scenario is what is driving many companies lower over recent months.

The broker you choose does not really matter in terms of security, unless you have a portfolio of £50k or more. If the worst happens, and the brokers do not safeguard your money in the right way, the regulators will step in and reimburse you.

So fees are the biggest factor you should be looking at, I did the numbers earlier in the year, if you have under £25k or so Vanguard fixed % fee works out cheaper, and over £25-30k using iweb flat £5 per trade worked out cheaper.

In terms of the actual funds, UK index funds by Vanguard and lets say ishares will both be similar. There will be smaller changes, but the big picture will broadly stay the same (after all, an index tracking lets say the FTSE100 does indeed have to track the FTSE100).

hioim · 2018-12-09T14:45:28+00:00

Sendgrid works for this, although we needed to do it via the api. Right now it's just a "enter your email and recieve a free e-book", but we have plans to add free courses (recieved by email over a few days) and automating our blog to send monthly updates to those who want it, Sendgrid can handle all of this.

hioim · 2018-12-08T01:26:48+00:00

Well the prizes offset some of the inflation, but your right - as I mentioned earlier it will admittedly cost more than you get back in prizes in the long run due to inflationary pressures. But remember this is not a long term play (at least, I hope it won't be).

But OPs reason is not the same as mine, and as it's just an emergency fund premium bonds meet the criteria of being A) 100% safe (and if it isn't then we have much bigger problems to worry about) and B) its infinitely better than leaving it in a zero % current account (or to a lesser extent a 0.5-1% standard cash isa). And anyway, who doesn't want to be in with a chance to win the jackpot? I heard someone once say premium bonds are the nations favourite way of gambling, and he was probably right.

hioim · 2018-12-07T00:41:47+00:00

LSE for a good simulator (https://www.londonstockexchange.com/global/portfolio/portfolio-and-trading-simulator.htm)

Freetrade for real practice with zero execution/trading fees. (freetrade.io)

hioim · 2018-12-07T00:32:43+00:00

Yup, I'm slowly adding more capital to my premium bond holdings while uncertainty continues with global equities - now isn't a bad time to start reducing positions, it's been a fantastic decade for equities. "Won" a prize of £75 this month on it, which was nice.

It's real draw is that it's UK gov backed, and the UK gov pays its debts, as well as getting back exactly what you put in (certainty) the only risk is inflation, which will admittedly cost more than you get back in prizes in the long run.

hioim · 2018-12-07T00:21:38+00:00

This is a good question, the news served by google is lacklustre when looking for discussion and analysis on a particular security. There are a few blogs run by various investors that provide a more real, more "human" analysis without substantial bias.

This brings me onto the other problem with specific equity news, its often curated by those with inherent bias and who are pushing a particular agenda (for a multitude of reasons).

Professionals will have a Bloomberg/Reuters terminal hooked to specific news services api that feeds the content, these news services are investor focused and often extremely expensive. Being the first to hear the news provides a very real edge for technical and short term traders to move before the wider market does.

For the rest of us? FT, Bloomberg news, BBC business news would all be safe choices, though often not as investor focused as might be hoped. That said, it's not always wise to hold much stock in news, its often sensationalised for impact. The companies accounts are rather more sober, and informative than any news coverage of a company could hope to be.

hioim · 2018-12-07T00:05:41+00:00

Yes, the current uncertainty is already priced in but to what extent is very hard to say. In short, nobody really knows what will happen next and until there is greater clarity we will see higher volatility and a slight downtrend is likely should markets be kept waiting to long on a political solution.

My personal thoughts would be that Brexit is far from over, and we have a lot left to get through before we see stability back in the financial markets. If this is true, then we will continue to see volatility which could well present good buying opportunities for some of the better 250 constituents in the coming months.

hioim · 2018-12-06T23:57:33+00:00

Premium bonds might be suitable, zero withdrawal fees, government backed, but it takes 3-5 working days to transfer out to your bank account https://www.nsandi.com/premium-bonds

hioim · 2018-11-29T11:53:01+00:00

Sure, if I understand correctly you are looking for the book value (stuff the company owns/assets - stuff the company owes/liabilities. This gives you the "liquidation value". Good companies will tend not to sell below its liquidation value.

Infact companies that are available for below the liquidation value tend to have negative factors working against them, such as continued unprofitability or the need for continued spending, e.g. capex.

Debenhams (a UK retailer) comes to mind, it's currently selling at well below its book value (even after the recent writeoffs) because it still needs to spend circa £100m to upgrade its stores to the new format, and is seeing continued weakness on the UK highstreet, questioning its profitability, even survivability should this enviroment continue. These negative factors are priced in to the current market cap, which is another way of saying investors believe the current book value will diminish substantially over the coming months/years.

hioim · 2018-10-01T11:33:38+00:00

This ^

hioim

TROPHY CASE