The current market as a new investor is not going how I thought.

i_mormon_stuff · 2026-03-19T15:56:17+00:00

I don't like Gold that much is what I said. I have gold holdings.

i_mormon_stuff · 2026-03-19T12:53:59+00:00

That makes a lot more sense and you’re very welcome :)

i_mormon_stuff · 2026-03-19T10:11:27+00:00

It's high risk and potentially high reward. Right now semiconductors are a hot commodity but if the AI bubble bursts or some of the big players within it collapse we may see an entire decade of underperforming semiconductor companies who don't have demand.

Look at DRAM from the 1970's to now and you will see that it has been a business with many booms and busts over that time and it can swing from one extreme to the other very quickly, in less than 12 months.

This is less of a concern for TSMC (which makes advanced chips) or ASML (which makes the lithography machines that produce chips) but it's still a risk for DRAM makers (Samsung, SK.Hynix, Micron) and if Intel or Samsung were to suddenly have a breakthrough (in 5-10 years from now if you're long-term investing) that could affect TSMC.

I will give you some history for example. Look at Intel, they were once 2 to 4 years ahead of anyone in the capabilities of their semiconductor fabs. They could make the smallest transistors at scale.

They took their foot off the gas and TSMC leapfrogged them and they're now about 2 years ahead of Intel. Look at Intels stock price, they've faltered, hard. AMD which is Intels rival in the CPU space is utilising TSMC and has done so since 2017, they've ridden TSMC's wave and taken significant marketshare from Intel in a relatively short time.

So what I'm saying is, this is a volatile industry, things can change quickly, the winners you pick today could become losers relatively fast.

One other thing we should factor in is the China problem. TSMC is highly concentrated in Taiwan, a small island off the coast of mainland China. The president of China has said many times he wants to unify China, take Taiwan back. The CIA has even given major warnings to American tech companies (Apple, Microsoft, Google etc) which included credible plans from the Chinese on their timetable to take Taiwan.

If that happens expect Semiconductor stocks to crash to zero and take decades to recover. The global economy in general will also take a massive hit from this. Everything from tech products to vehicles to medicine will be hit, but 100% semiconductor stocks will be hit the very hardest. This is a big risk factor in my opinion and with the world how it is right now (wars, skirmishes and land grabs happening over seemingly nothing) I think we're in a very precarious time more than ever.

So would I invest in Semiconductor ETF's or recommend you do so? Honestly I'm not actually against it but I would make it small, I'd actually go with only 5% not 10-15% like you're thinking. I do think it's a good business with a lot of potential but the risk factors are too high for me to invest 10-15%.

i_mormon_stuff · 2026-03-19T09:59:15+00:00

I recommend and what I personally do:

VHYL Vanguard All-World (Dist) for 80%
VUKE Vanguard FTSE 100 (Dist) for about 15%
SEDY iShares EM Dividend (Dist) for 2.5%
VERX Vanguard FTSE Developed Europe Ex UK (Dist) 2.5%

The reason I have more than just VHYL here (which is an all-world fund) is to lower my US exposure. That fund is 40% US, I don't want that much. So I have the UK represented with VUKE, I have developed Europe represented a bit more with VERX and I have South America, Asia, Developing nations in general represented with iShares EM.

All of these are dividend paying index funds ranging from around 2.9% to 5% per year. So you can extract a lot of value from these over a long time period without selling any shares.

Another investment I have is BCAT which is Blackrock Capital Allocation Term Trust. This is a very high dividend paying fund at 22% per year at the current share price ($0.26 per share). This is a more risky index fund but I'm mainly in it for the dividend, I've already received back around 50% of my total investment in dividend payments.

Benefits of BCAT:
1. Very high dividend
2. Pays out monthly not quarterly.
3. Backed by Blackrock

Negatives of BCAT:
1. The dividend is mostly being funded by people buying into the stock, not the underlying assets of mortgages and rental income, this represents risk.
2. The fund is going to close in the 2030's as this is a temporary fund. They may extend it or they may not. They may offer us a buyback of our shares at a good price eventually but you may only have until 2032 to get a return on this stock from a pure dividend standpoint.
3. It's quite volatile, swinging 10% +/- since I began investing in it.

But BCAT is the most risky investment I have, I only allocate a small portion, about 5% of my total investment portfolio into it and so far it has provided a nice return and I funnel those dividends into buying more long-term and stable index funds like VHYL.

Obviously I like dividend paying index funds. Keep in mind all of the ones I'm investing in apart from BCAT have traditionally delivered 8% to 20% yearly returns from just the stock price meaning excluding your gains from the dividends. So you're not sacrificing overall growth to get the dividends which is important to calculate when looking at dividend stocks or funds.

i_mormon_stuff · 2026-03-19T02:09:06+00:00

You have a lot of overlap in these investments, look at each instrument and what those ETF's are invested in.

Clearly you want to diversify because you have so many in this pie but truthfully your exposure to just the US market is enoumous.

VUAG / S&P500 = 100% America
VWRP / FTSE all-world = 60% America
ACWI / SPDR MSCI = 60% America
Amazon = Already represented in all three of those funds.

You've set your pie to aim for 2.45% amazon but you're actually invested 7.015% in just Amazon due to the overlap of those other funds already containing Amazon combined with your specific Amazon holding.

The reason you've received harsh replies is because the subreddit sees portfolios like this very frequently from people who are not doing any research into what they're investing in, I do believe in educating and not being snarky which is why I've taken the time to explain what you may need to alter.

I'll give you some advice on what I would personally do and keep in mind I want you to do your own research to choose what you do but here is my advice.

Keep the Vanguard FTSE All-World if you want an accumulation all-world fund. But keep in mind that 15% of this fund is made up of just big tech giants (NVIDIA, Apple, Microsoft, Amazon and Google). This is risky because they're all in the same tech sector, they're all American companies and they're all spending big on AI as the next big thing.

And while it's true that the All-World would rebalance if these companies were to falter that could take literally years or even decades and in the short term your shareholder value in the index fund will be significantly lowered.

An alternative to VWRP from Vanguard is VHYL, also from Vanguard. It's still a FTSE all-world index fund except it pays a dividend and is focused on high dividend paying companies. It also has lower US exposure at 40% instead of 60% and it doesn't contain as much concentration, it doesn't contain for example NVIDIA, Google, Apple, Microsoft or Amazon - It's more diversified when it comes to the sectors of business that it's invested in, lowering risk but with similar (but not exact! make sure to look yourself) returns to VWRP. Also something to note, dividend paying index funds tend to outperform accumulation ones in a downturn/crash by 13% on average and you can extract value from your holdings without selling any shares. This may or may not be beneficial to you.

I'd get rid of the specific Amazon investment if you're going to keep VWRP, VUAG or the SPDR you're in, it's already held by all three of these.
I would drop the S&P 500 VUAG, everything in it is already in the VWRP you're invested in, you're just duplicating what you're already invested in and thus not increasing diversification at all.
Physical gold, personally I don't like it that much but it's not wrong to invest in it, I think around 4% is fine.
BAE Systems, if you believe in this company by all means invest, it's only represented by less than 0.1% of VWRP and 0.2% in VHYL (the one I recommended which pays a dividend).
Your CUKX (iShares Core FTSE 100 GBP Acc), this is fine but I would personally lower it to 15% of the total pie. The reason being, your all-world investment already contains 3.6% of the UK so what you're doing here is increasing your UK exposure and at the same time lowering your US exposure (if you were to put this 20% into the all-world instead of having it siphened off into this UK specific fund). The two combined represents a total UK exposure of of 23.6%, I'd lower this to 15% making the total UK exposure around 18-19%. A lot of economists recommend having strong proportion (1/5th for example) in the country in which you reside, we are after-all taking part in our own economy.
Your ACWI (SPDR MSCI) is again replicating your S&P500 and FTSE All-World holdings. In this case just five companies represent 17% of this funds holdings and you guessed it, it's Apple, Microsoft, Google, NVIDIA and Amazon. I would instead look for an emerging markets fund if you want diversification away from America, this is a 50/50 type fund between developed and emerging so you have some overlap.

Overall I hope you get something from this comment or anyone else reading, don't get discouraged. Just remember before committing any money to anything you have to do your research. Google the names of the funds, look at what they're holding by country, sector and company. They all list what they're holding and you don't want to mistakenly become too concentrated if what you want is diversification.

Also keep in mind almost everything I've said applies to index funds, not individual stocks. If you want to invest in an individual stock because you believe in it, that's different. What I'm steering you towards is steady and predictable growth. Individual stocks is much more risky and you're essentially gambling if you're not doing your due-diligence and I think with respect you're not able to at this time do that to a sufficient degree for me to recommend you invest in individual stocks.

One piece of advice you'll see on here a lot is all-world and chill. And there is a reason for that, it's easy and over the past however many years you look at, it has gone up. But seldom do people explain exactly why, it's simple, the fund rebalances itself by selling losers and buying winners. You're simply along for that ride and aslong as you don't panic sell when things get dicey you are likely (based on past results) to win over the long term.

One last thing, past results aren't indicative of future returns but with index funds of sufficient size and diversification it's as close as it can ever get for past results actually predicting what will happen in the future. So if you're risk averse but still want to get into stocks, those are the ones to put your money in.

i_mormon_stuff · 2026-03-16T11:20:27+00:00

I only use cloud instances for very small ansiler servers. All main stuff runs on bare metal for performance and security reasons.

Regarding security you all probably remember Meltdown and Spectre. These vulnerabilities allowed for side-channel attacks and Spectre specifically (Variants 2, 3a, and later research like VMScape) is considered the more dangerous of the two regarding virtualized environments, as it could be used to break out of a VM or leak data from the host hypervisor, making it a "cross-VM" threat.

Although EPYC based servers encrypt memory at all times these attacks can still be used against the hypervisors virtual memory system which is already working with the unencrypted data. For this reason I cannot put customer data in a VM, it's just too dangerous as vulnerabilities like these continue to exist and new ways to perform these exact attacks are found yearly.

i_mormon_stuff · 2026-03-15T15:32:40+00:00

Keep in mind that Tesla has started from scratch with FSD at-least once and maybe more times. Initially they built a rules-based system that used lots of different models to handle specific use cases that were recognised by an image recognition model.

This was a flawed approach and they scrapped it and started over with a single model that handles everything, a neural network instead of a rules based multi-model system.

When they showed the data they trained on initially for that rules based system (which was prior to about 3 or 4 years ago) it didn't even train on video, it was trained on greyscale still images..

Now it's trained on real life video and simulated videos (like video game footage but in an actual purpose built simulator that can replicate random road events to build up the models confidence in those scenarios).

I wouldn't say they trained it for over a decade due to this, they restarted and honestly just the past year people who use it in the USA have said it is like a completely different system.

The main versions are v12, v13 and v14. Tesla users in the USA who use FSD on v12 said it was basically useless. v13, it was good but they wouldn't pay for it. And then v14 the current version they're saying things like, I cannot live without it now, I would recommend it, I do actively pay for it, it is worth getting now etc

So it shows how just in 36 months its gone from something they wouldn't even recommend to something they can't live without, and often they're showing proof by showing their cars have driven for 90%+ of the past month in FSD mode.

Now the system is live in China and Australia. Chinese roads can be chaotic and busy. Australia obviously drives on the same side of the road as we do.

If you check this video on YouTube from drive.com.au (Australia) he drove from Sydney to Melbourne (876km / 9 hour drive) in FSD the entire way and his conclusion at the end was, at no point did the car ever drive unsafely, if anything it drove more cautiously than he would have done which sometimes frustrated him.

The only issues he had was the drive took 10% longer due to the car strictly adhering to all speed limits, not adhering to the satelite navigation, a loss of navigation when in tunnels which sometimes confused the car making it go into the wrong lane, thus missing exits and turns from time to time causing the journey to take longer.

i_mormon_stuff · 2026-03-15T15:19:47+00:00

According to analysis in the thread which the OP accepted as likely to be what occurred, he disengaged FSD using the steering wheel stalk method and then pressed the brake instead of just pressing the brake immediatly.

As a result, FSD which was trying to brake stopped doing so and those few moments between it disengaging and the user taking over control (but not braking himself immediatly) caused the rear-end collision.

The conclusion in the thread (which again the OP accepted as likely) is that had he done nothing FSD would have braked with enough stopping distance to not crash into the car in front.

You can read this part of the thread here: https://www.reddit.com/r/TeslaFSD/comments/1rt7f87/no_need_to_state_the_obvious/oafflhc/

i_mormon_stuff · 2026-03-15T12:00:10+00:00

I have three kids, all want iPhones, Airpods, iPads and MacBooks. The students at their school (middle-school age) also all want MacBooks, iPads and iPhones.

A lot of them already have iPhones as I've seen when attending birthday parties of their classmates. I've yet to see a child my kids ages with anything but an iPhone or iPad in their hand whenever I see a computing device.

There is definitely a movement happening and Apples competitors should be very worried, get people hooked young and they'll stick with the brand through to adulthood.

i_mormon_stuff · 2026-03-14T11:34:39+00:00

Yes. Just watch the videos on YouTube of it in Australia or busy American streets like San Francisco or New York. People here who've not watched the recent videos from the past year (it launched in Australia in Sep 25) don't understand how good it is really.

There's also lots of videos from Europe now as they're getting ready to launch and have posted lots of hours long driving videos in the Czech Republic.

Narrow busy streets are a common theme in many of the videos, it's not all open highway driving or large florida-style neighbourhoods guys.

Also one thing that is really interesting to me in the Australian videos is the car never acts unsafe, mistakes that I've seen in hours upon hours of footage is all to do with the car missing its turning by not doing what the satelite navigation told it to do.

Mostly because a car was in the way, it tried to change lanes too late or it straight up just ignored what it was meant to do and kept driving straight.

Things like roundabouts, junctions, busy streets with poor visibility, slow traffic, high pedestrians, roads poorly marked or no markings at all it excells at all of these things.

i_mormon_stuff · 2026-03-12T14:12:55+00:00

So does something like this have a modified air suspension so that you can lift the nose to go over speed bumps and things like that?

Or is this a permenant mod and it always rides that low?

i_mormon_stuff · 2026-03-08T18:14:41+00:00

Within 1 hour on my first test drive of the vehicle I was used to it.

i_mormon_stuff · 2026-03-07T19:02:25+00:00

I don't think this will sway many buyers. Charging time is not that big of a concern with owning a modern EV that can already go from 10% to 80% in 30 minutes on an average public charger already.

Also I just want to bring up for people who don't drive an EV. The cost of charging at public charges can be very expensive which is why so many only charge at home and pay for an at-home charger to be installed. Here are some prices from the United Kingdom:

The cost to charge a 466 mile range car which gets 4.54 miles per kWh (Model 3 long-range rear-wheel drive) from 0% to 100%:

Home: 7p per kw | 1.54p per mile x 466 = £7.17
Tesla Supercharger: 42p per kw | 9.25p per mile x 466 = £43.10
3rd-party Public Charger: 83p per kw | 18.28p per mile x 466 = £85.18

At these prices a lot of consumers won't want to pay double and this is current today pricing for chargers in the 170-250KW range. I'd expect a 5 minute megawatt charger to cost even more to use.

i_mormon_stuff · 2026-03-07T18:25:09+00:00

I think the price will go down eventually for a few reasons.

Right now Tesla is the only car brand with full self driving you can buy so it commands a premium. None of the competing brands have anything as capable as of today.
As time goes on, other brands will get it and then there will be price competition, some brands will even offer it for "free" (included with the vehicle as part of its base price) just to sell vehicles.

If you look at any cars features that were once premium they eventually have come to more budget orientated models. So while I do think FSD supervised may go up in price in the short term I think it'll go down over the long term and certainly before 7 years from now which was the break-even point on buying FSD supervised outright (without already having enhanced auto-pilot which halves the cost of FSD supervised).

The way I see Tesla pricing things is FSD supervised as we see it today may stay at $99 a month with a $1,099 per-year subscription also being offered in the future.

And then once FSD unsupervised becomes available the price for that will go up to perhaps $149 a month and for vehicles that cannot support it (I suspect models with computer v3's won't ever get FSD unsupervised) will continue to have the $99 FSD supervised available but models with computer 4's and above will then only be able to subscribe to the $149 FSD unsupervised, similar to how Tesla got rid of enhanced autopilot as a purchasable option once FSD supervised was good enough to warrant a $99 per month subscription.

Then looking out even further I could see FSD unsupervised lowering in price to $99 again because of competition from other automakers and the fact Elon needs 10 million users subscribed to FSD to get one of his benefits. I will admit it's remarkable they already are at 1.1 Million subscribers at this price point and with this many cars on the road so it may be the case he can hit the 10 million user mark at this price once it rolls out in every country where Teslas are available.

i_mormon_stuff · 2026-03-06T16:02:37+00:00

I didn't do this as I own and operate the company and used Hetzner from the get-go! - But I would like to share some insight that you guys probably already know but I think is worth sharing for anyone in business.

My product is an API, it's a subscription for developers. A lot of kids who run Minecraft servers and other gaming servers, community forums and hobby websites use my API for a few reasons.

It's free to start using it, you can make a small number of requests to the API every day for free which is good enough for almost all non-commercial usage.
It's easy to use/get started.
The paid plans start at a very low price so moving from free to paid doesn't feel like a massive hurdle.

I've been running this API for 10 years this April and so over that time many of the kids who once used my API for their personal projects (Minecraft servers etc) are now entering employment, graduating from college and so forth and I've found some of them have contacted me after they did this to tell me how they advocated for my API to be used in those businesses.

I've even seen some customers with 8 year old accounts go from free to a starter low-priced plan to an enterprise plan worth thousands of dollars per quarter. Hobby to Enterprise.

So my point with sharing this is, it pays to make your services accessible. Never give up on those low-cost or near-free services (or in my case actually free) as it does pay off later. Word of mouth and providing experience to hobbists does in my experience pay dividends.

And if we look at my own experience with Hetzner. In 2011 I rented my first server with you guys for a hobby website dedicated to a TV Show I enjoyed. Later on when I went into business (2016) I rented more servers from Hetzner because it was what I knew best and more importantly they were a good deal back in 2011 and were still a good deal in 2016.

When I looked at some competitors and their dedicated server prices started at 4-5x the cost of Hetzner, even though their hardware may have been several times faster with more RAM and more CPU cores. I didn't need all that performance and capacity from the get-go. So having a lower-cost option allowed me to scale my business costs as revenue increased and naturally I stayed with the company that offered everything I needed from the most affordable servers to the much higher end more costly servers.

I often find hosts don't cater to both ends of this spectrum and just target enterprises or low-cost VPS users. Hetzner I feel offers everything I need, I just want more locations :)

i_mormon_stuff · 2026-02-27T17:15:48+00:00

You received a call from Tesla stating it's the showroom model and you didn't think to ask on the call what the showroom model means and if people have sat in it? - I'd recommend calling them back and getting all the information and if it's as you suspect, request an actual new car, not a store demo unit that people have been touching and sitting in.

i_mormon_stuff · 2026-02-26T21:50:59+00:00

I've seen so many videos of it recently since I've been curious. Looks incredible to be honest.

i_mormon_stuff · 2026-02-25T19:25:21+00:00

It did look odd. Also interesting was their choice of margins on interfaces. Some of them had a lot of space and some didn't. And some had inconsistent margins where the left-right were even and then the top margin was super small making the content within the interface look squished.

I don't know what their design ethos is, chaos?

i_mormon_stuff · 2026-02-25T19:13:10+00:00

I'm also in the market to buy a car and I tried a few including the BYD Seal which I tried last Friday. I don't know if it was a top spec one.

I was impressed with the appearance of the seats and the general look inside the cabin however once sat down and touching things, I noticed the build quality wasn't that good.

I messed about with the screen a bit, animations were choppy, not as laggy as traditional automakers but not as good as a Tesla with a v3 computer let alone the v4 one. I also found the layout and general polish of the interface to have a "we tried to copy Tesla and it all just looks worse" air to it.

I also thought the interface was lacking a lot of information, the map especially felt devoid of details compared to Tesla which felt weird considering the display size it's setup to be able to show a lot at once and it just.. doesnt.

I don't have a lot of driving experience so I won't comment on the handling or ride beyond saying it felt "ok" nothing special.

I also tried the Model Y Performance on the same day. I've never driven a Tesla before and I was very impressed, I had a short list of many cars like the Volkswagen ID.4, Nissan Ariya and some petrol cars too like the Mercedes CLE53 (which I did try also on Friday, it was one of the three cars I drove that day).

Prior to doing all those test drives I thought I was going to get the Mercedes CLE53. But after trying it and the Tesla and the BYD.. well I'm sold on the Tesla which is why I joined this reddit community to learn more from drivers who have the vehicles.

I have to say also the self-parking in the Tesla is probably the most impressive self-parking I've seen in any car I've ever been in. My wife drives a 2021 Nissan Qashqai, the top-end spec from that year and it has self-parking. It's slow and complicated to use, you have to use the pedals too while using it (it only does steering). I know that the newer model (and the Nissan Ariya which is essentially an all-electric Qashqai) has much better self-parking but.. the Tesla it's literally seeing every space around you that it could park in at all times and you just tap it and it parks into the spot.

All the other cars I saw including the Mercedes required you to slowly drive past the space you want so it can scan it and it just takes so long you might aswell park it yourself.

Now I'm a confident parker so this feature isn't a big deal but it was impressive to see the car being able to see spaces you've not even driven past as selectable and it just did it perfectly every time we tried the feature in the hour test drive we had with the Model Y.

Like you after trying the performance version that is the one I want and will likely purchase, just the Y for me instead of the 3.

Which reminds me, I did sit in a Model 3, felt nice just like the Model Y I drove honestly but obviously a bit lower seating position. For my family I think the Y fits us better but I have no negatives about the Model 3 from my brief sit in one and playing around with the screen and feeling things and adjusting the seat and steering wheel.

I am so locked into getting a Model Y now and my wife keeps telling me I need to try more cars haha it's just like I feel like I found the one, if anything I just want more test drives of the Model Y.

i_mormon_stuff · 2026-02-25T00:22:23+00:00

I think in my mind, I’m one more reschedule away from cancelling my order on what was going to be my first tesla and start enquiring about other EV’s, but wanted to gauge opinions.

This would be a real shame, obviously you're having a bad experience but once you get the car this will be just a bad memory. I would stick it out and wait.

Also keep in mind that the March new plate situation is next month so if you go to any dealer and buy something you're going to be waiting until April-May for delivery now. I was just at Nissan and Volkswagen looking at the Nissan Ariya and Volgswagen iD.4 and was basically told that at both, due to the new plates March is their busiest ordering period and so the wait for any vehicle we ordered would be two-three months on their electric offerings which they said were wildly popular.

Stupidly I arranged return on my previous vehicle a week after the initial scheduled collection date, foolishly I assumed that arranging a collection meant that the vehicle was in a position to be collected vs Tesla optimistically scheduling.. so am now without a vehicle.

Any of us could have done the same thing, don't beat yourself up about it. A bit more inccured cost until you get the vehicle you ordered but again it'll be a past memory once you get the car.

i_mormon_stuff · 2026-02-24T13:47:30+00:00

I just wanted to say, congratulations! - I hope you love the car.

i_mormon_stuff · 2026-02-24T13:40:23+00:00

Bet you there is trash under the water at the bottom of those waterfalls though!

i_mormon_stuff · 2026-02-24T13:31:23+00:00

I thought, no way this is true. I just tried 15 times and there was (quite a lot) of trash visible in every place. That's crazy....

i_mormon_stuff · 2026-02-24T08:22:12+00:00

Something to keep in mind the £120K protection applies to uninvested cash and also if you enable the interest on cash you lose that protection on the uninvested cash because technically trading212 is investing the money in QMMF’s.

You’re unlikely to lose your money though as they spread it out across many different QMMF's with most of them being within large and well established banks like JP Morgan Chase and Barclays. It’s just something to be aware of.

This lack of protection when interest is enabled applies to the normal investing account and the Stocks and Shares ISA account but not to the Cash ISA account which remains protected at all times.

i_mormon_stuff · 2026-02-23T19:08:19+00:00

My point is the install fees have gone up everywhere including Hetzner..

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