Investing

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LinusP
Posts: 1869
Joined: Mon Jul 02, 2012 10:45 pm

I am starting to think seriously about the future so want to look into investing whilst I have time on my side. I already have a maxed out LISA/ISA/premium bonds and pay a lot into my pension (still working PT)

To start does anyone have any recommendations on Tracker Funds, either where to invest or where to go to read up? As soon as you go on google everyone is out to sell and it's tricky to see through the noise.

Welcome any thoughts.
weemac
Posts: 1216
Joined: Mon Sep 16, 2013 8:16 pm

Forget trackers.

If I could re-wind the clock 35 years, and John Kingham had been around, and I had known then what I know now, his basic idea is what I would have followed. He gives away almost everything you need to do it yourself for free.

https://www.ukvalueinvestor.com/investment-strategy-2/
LinusP
Posts: 1869
Joined: Mon Jul 02, 2012 10:45 pm

weemac wrote:
Mon Aug 06, 2018 7:10 pm
Forget trackers.

If I could re-wind the clock 35 years, and John Kingham had been around, and I had known then what I know now, his basic idea is what I would have followed. He gives away almost everything you need to do it yourself for free.

https://www.ukvalueinvestor.com/investment-strategy-2/
Interesting, have you read the book or just the free resources?
weemac
Posts: 1216
Joined: Mon Sep 16, 2013 8:16 pm

I've received his free newsletter for a couple of years and read many of his articles, buy/sell advice, portfolio updates etc. I used to read his column in the FT years ago, so I've been aware of him for ages and have always liked his style. I think I'd feel able to construct a portfolio on my own using his free resources, spreadsheets etc.
pythonic
Posts: 65
Joined: Sun Jul 08, 2018 10:20 pm

Value investing is a good idea, but if you want to keep it simple and save yourself the efford of security analysis and stock picking then a cheap Index Fund e.g. on the SP500 or the MSCI World would be a good way to get exposure in stocks.
Keep it simple, don't choose obscure indices or issuers unless you have a good reason and look for the costs, which should be below 0.5 % for the major indices.
I use www.justetf.com for comparison and bought a cheap ETF for the MSCI World a while ago.
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ShaunWhite
Posts: 9731
Joined: Sat Sep 03, 2016 3:42 am

It all depends on your attitude to risk and when you think you might need it back (sorry if that's obvious). As the years have gone by I've slowly moved what's about 80% of my pension pot into safe sectors even though the growth is unspectacular. The rest is more of a punt but very spread around. I'm more cautious these days because I'm planning on drawing on mine in a year or two and with the world ecomony being 'uncertain', I didn't want to blow 35yrs of savings because Trump tweeted something stupid or brexit didn't lead us to the garden of Eden. If I was 40 again, I'd probably be looking at much longer dated things, as it is I even see buying 12 months car tax as an unnecessary risk. :)
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marksmeets302
Posts: 527
Joined: Thu Dec 10, 2009 4:37 pm

A nice site to compare portfolio allocations is https://portfoliocharts.com. My personal favorite is "the permanent portfolio". Extremely simple, requires no timing expertise and grows at about 6% on top of inflation with extremely low volatility. Very easy to implement with ETFs (trackers) and futures. You get about 30 years of out of sample data, this allocation was first proposes somewhere in the 80s.
arbitrage16
Posts: 527
Joined: Tue Feb 14, 2017 7:27 pm

Ray Dalio is your guy.

Check out UK Personal Finance on Reddit. They will recommend a book called Smarter Investing by Tim Hale, read it.

Essentially - buy index funds.
LinusP
Posts: 1869
Joined: Mon Jul 02, 2012 10:45 pm

Thank you all for your responses, busy reading up.
Nero Tulip
Posts: 686
Joined: Wed Apr 15, 2009 5:29 pm

Along similar lines as portfolio charts, I would recommend taking in some of Meb Faber's free papers as a next step, they might provide an additional layer of ideas on top of just buy and hold and rebalance. Like sports, momentum is persistent in financials and he demonstrates the benefits in very simple terms. Also see Gary Antonacci (maybe mis-spelt that one..). I prefer a combination of these sorts of ideas, with some cheap contrarian picks that I add to the mix that have ideally as little correlation to the others as possible. Anyway, keep fees as low as possible, there's a world of financial industry out there that wants to suck the blood out of you, don't make a lot of transactions, unless you use your data analysis knowledge and find a good strategy (doesn't stop me from hunting for one) and don't read anything that suggests there's a free lunch to be had...most people fail at investing because they underestimate the slowness with which you get rich, and they dump a strategy because they haven't given it long enough, like round here but 100x longer. Also I would say, 'beating the market' is not the 'be all', reducing draw downs is something I would arguably assign slightly more importance.

Annoyingly, I do most of my investing in the US stock markets via ETFs... and that has now been blocked by a new EU rule that says the US ETF providers must provide a new 2 page document spelling out the risks/structure of each ETF... which came into effect at start of year I think. And they aren't doing it ! This includes the oldest and biggest ETF SPY, which is now not available to european retail investors. Much head scratching as to why they won't provide the document, despite having an 85 page prospectus they could copy and paste from, suggests that they want the Euro investors to use locally listed products with much wider spreads and far higher management fees. I could register as professional to get access, but data fees will go up a fair bit I think..and that's not an option for most people. Upshot is, you might want to use futures or options...or if anyone else has any ideas (Peter?) ?
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Euler
Posts: 24675
Joined: Wed Nov 10, 2010 1:39 pm
Location: Bet Angel HQ

I have a dollar account with a US broker so I can trade / invest natively in the US.

I started investing during the maggie privatisation era and morphed from an early stab at TA to a long-term investor. You have to marvel at the returns you get by being completely apathetic. If you do your work up front and buy into fairly solid companies at a good price you generally do OK over time. If you exhibit some skill at identifying good opportunities you can really put on a decent return.

As a test, I took out a tracker when I first started and have left it to compound. It's miles behind my own portfolio now on the basis that I have almost zero frictional costs and I can elect not to buy what look like poor investments.
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marksmeets302
Posts: 527
Joined: Thu Dec 10, 2009 4:37 pm

I have a dollar account with a US broker so I can trade / invest natively in the US.
Unfortunately, no. Since a couple of months your broker will block you from trading the ETFs. The problem is as Nero Tulip describes, but it goes a bit further. The european commission has decided that all ETFs should comply with the PRIIPS regulation. Most notably this means there should be documents (called KID) for the ETFs, and these should be available in your own language. No big deal, but... PRIIPS also requires that in that document there is a section with optimistic, realistic and pessimistic returns. In the US, it is forbidden to include those numbers in the prospectus of an ETF. And there's the rub: you can't have two different sets of documentation identifying the same ETF.

I've been on a crusade against this idiotic regulation. Called the regulator, two lobby groups, a member of parliament and reached out to the european commission. Nothing happened. With any luck the regulation will be evaluated later this year.

But... I did learn that you can be exempt from this regulation if you qualify as a professional investor, and that's what I did. Ask your broker for the requirements. The 'professional' only refers to your level of expertise, it has nothing to do with the 'professional' in market data. In other words, the fees for market data and transactions are unchanged.

Or wait for brexit to happen if you live in the UK.
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Euler
Posts: 24675
Joined: Wed Nov 10, 2010 1:39 pm
Location: Bet Angel HQ

I'm unaffected by this legislation it seems.
LinusP
Posts: 1869
Joined: Mon Jul 02, 2012 10:45 pm

Euler wrote:
Tue Aug 14, 2018 10:58 am
I have a dollar account with a US broker so I can trade / invest natively in the US.

I started investing during the maggie privatisation era and morphed from an early stab at TA to a long-term investor. You have to marvel at the returns you get by being completely apathetic. If you do your work up front and buy into fairly solid companies at a good price you generally do OK over time. If you exhibit some skill at identifying good opportunities you can really put on a decent return.

As a test, I took out a tracker when I first started and have left it to compound. It's miles behind my own portfolio now on the basis that I have almost zero frictional costs and I can elect not to buy what look like poor investments.
Any advice to go with that?
DeepWire9
Posts: 6
Joined: Thu Feb 21, 2019 8:09 am

I advise you to study the behavior of the main investors in this market (Buffett, Timur Artemev, Richard Dennis) These whales are influence the market. Also pay attention to the fundamental analysis and international news. Ideally find a mentor
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