Investments

[Ricky Otto]

I have recently starting investing in stocks and shares after spending a lot of time speaking with a friend over the last couple of lockdowns. I invested before without much of a clue as to what I was doing or looking for, I was seeing the potential of a certain product but not finding the right company dealing in that product. There seems to be opportunities galore at the moment and I thought it might be a good idea to share them on here, I am certainly open to hearing them! I'm not necessarily talking about companies, it could just be an area of growth where the right company needs to be identified. My friend is the finance director of a shipping company, he handles their investment portfolio and also makes personal investments. He caught my attention when he told me he had paid off his mortgage after buying shares in a company that mines palladium (he bought shares at 0.5p and sold at 28p). Palladium is a metal used in electric cars and that is where the growth came from. My friend also put me onto VOX markets, a website and a podcast by a shrewd investor named Justin Waite, my friend gets a lot of his investment ideas from here. Any ideas or discussion would be great! Examples of areas I have invested in that I think are hot are as follows:

Electric Vehicles - With the announcement that all sales of new diesel and petrol cars will be outlawed in 2030 this seems like a massive growth market. I am still looking for a good lithium mining company in this area that is proving difficult!

Renewable energy - another growth market like electric vehicles.

E-Sports - anyone with a kid will know the potential of this market. My stepson would rather watch a gaming tournament on youtube than a football match!

Medical/ Pharma - Post covid boom there are still many revolutionary treatments, drugs, imaging techs etc.

Bitcoin - a lot of sceptics on this one but I am doing very well with a crypto mining company


Any obvious growth areas people can think of? also very happy to talk specific companies in any of the areas i've mentioned above if you are interested.

 

[Member]

Buy low sell high

 

[OldBlueLady]

Don't invest more than you're prepared to lose.

The ex started out doing penny shares, then asked me to choose a couple when things were going well. I chose M&S and Whitbread, both of which repaid us not only in dividends but had increased massively when we sold, and Brands Hatch Leisure, which also recouped us quite a large amount. He plumped for Telewest and a few others that didn't do so well.

 

[Stan33]

I have recently starting investing in stocks and shares after spending a lot of time speaking with a friend over the last couple of lockdowns. I invested before without much of a clue as to what I was doing or looking for, I was seeing the potential of a certain product but not finding the right company dealing in that product. There seems to be opportunities galore at the moment and I thought it might be a good idea to share them on here, I am certainly open to hearing them! I'm not necessarily talking about companies, it could just be an area of growth where the right company needs to be identified. My friend is the finance director of a shipping company, he handles their investment portfolio and also makes personal investments. He caught my attention when he told me he had paid off his mortgage after buying shares in a company that mines palladium (he bought shares at 0.5p and sold at 28p). Palladium is a metal used in electric cars and that is where the growth came from. My friend also put me onto VOX markets, a website and a podcast by a shrewd investor named Justin Waite, my friend gets a lot of his investment ideas from here. Any ideas or discussion would be great! Examples of areas I have invested in that I think are hot are as follows:

Electric Vehicles - With the announcement that all sales of new diesel and petrol cars will be outlawed in 2030 this seems like a massive growth market. I am still looking for a good lithium mining company in this area that is proving difficult!

Renewable energy - another growth market like electric vehicles.

E-Sports - anyone with a kid will know the potential of this market. My stepson would rather watch a gaming tournament on youtube than a football match!

Medical/ Pharma - Post covid boom there are still many revolutionary treatments, drugs, imaging techs etc.

Bitcoin - a lot of sceptics on this one but I am doing very well with a crypto mining company


Any obvious growth areas people can think of? also very happy to talk specific companies in any of the areas i've mentioned above if you are interested.

Just a note of caution ,I got to know a guy and spoke to him a few times over a number of years .One day he came in to c me for some advice ,during the conversation I asked him what he did for a living ,he said he used to b a broker .I said what do u mean ’used to b ‘ he said I made so much money I retired,he must have been in his thirties .
I’ve now lost the lot and have to go back to work .
Beware they can go up as well as down .?

 

[Mad Cyril]

Greed is good.

Lunch is for wimps.

 

[Ricky Otto]

Just a note of caution ,I got to know a guy and spoke to him a few times over a number of years .One day he came in to c me for some advice ,during the conversation I asked him what he did for a living ,he said he used to b a broker .I said what do u mean ’used to b ‘ he said I made so much money I retired,he must have been in his thirties .
I’ve now lost the lot and have to go back to work .
Beware they can go up as well as down .?

I'm not worried about that, I am quite a risk averse person. My years in the insurance industry have taught me a lot about exposure and how to avoid it. It probably means I will never make serious money, but I won't lose it either. This is a hobby with some of my savings, I actually enjoy it but my stakes aren't massive.

 

[Supershrimper]

Buy low sell high

Couldn't agree more. I bought some shares in an insurance company I used to work for in March when they were at their lowest they had been for many a year. Today they are worth 84% more than I bought them for, but i'll keep them as they pay out pretty good dividends.

I work for a company that is a platform for people to invest their money. The minute we went into lockdown all the markets went into freefall. And the first thing people did was move their money out of the falling markets. In my mind that was the wrong decision. Markets were always going to bounce back up. If you have missed the boat and not moved out before the markets start to drop you might as well hold on, enjoy the ride and wait for the recovery.

My pension (invested in UK and US equities) was worth £69.5k on the 23/2/2020. The markets started to drop shortly afterwards. One month later it was worth £47.6k. If i'd have moved my monies from the equities I was in and into the "safe havens" of gold etc I would have moved out when my pension was at its lowest and not benefited from the bounce it has had since.

The markets gradually recovered and it took 3 months for my pension to get back to where it was. Today, with all of the news with the vaccines my pension is now worth £77k.

 

[Ricky Otto]

Couldn't agree more. I bought some shares in an insurance company I used to work for in March when they were at their lowest they had been for many a year. Today they are worth 84% more than I bought them for, but i'll keep them as they pay out pretty good dividends.

I work for a company that is a platform for people to invest their money. The minute we went into lockdown all the markets went into freefall. And the first thing people did was move their money out of the falling markets. In my mind that was the wrong decision. Markets were always going to bounce back up. If you have missed the boat and not moved out before the markets start to drop you might as well hold on, enjoy the ride and wait for the recovery.

My pension (invested in UK and US equities) was worth £69.5k on the 23/2/2020. The markets started to drop shortly afterwards. One month later it was worth £47.6k. If i'd have moved my monies from the equities I was in and into the "safe havens" of gold etc I would have moved out when my pension was at its lowest and not benefited from the bounce it has had since.

The markets gradually recovered and it took 3 months for my pension to get back to where it was. Today, with all of the news with the vaccines my pension is now worth £77k.

Who was that? Interested to know, I work for a Lloyds syndicate and never saw this as an opportunity, I have just looked at charts for Tokio Marine and Hiscox and there is certainly a big increase from March to now, but they are still someway short of where they were January. I think this is a trend for most stocks. Hindsight hey, they always say buy in the dips but it takes balls of steel when dealing with something unprecedented like we are experiencing now. I did top up on some of my existing investments when the market had a sell off for t6he second lockdown but the drops and bounceback were small in comparison.

 

[Supershrimper]

Legal and General (LGEN) Also provides quite a decent dividend yield as well.

I bought just shortly after my birthday in March at 138.60 and they are now valued at 255.00. It was my little birthday treat to myself otherwise I probably wouldn't have bought at that exact moment they were at their lowest.

Agreed this is very uncertain times and nothing the markets have ever experienced before. The way I look at it is i'm playing with my pension. I've got another 20 / 30 years for it to recover if it all goes disastrously wrong. And if the pandemic was the end for the human civilization I wouldn't get to use it anyway.

Only thing holding my UK equities fund in my pension back from joining the growth of my US equities is Brexit. Get it sorted Boris!!

 

[Napster]

My fund Polar Technologies has made me 35% growth- now investing in a balanced managed fund for long term growth. I think you can't really look at sectors (unless you want to avoid them like oil and gas), but individual companies.

Pension through company is on 4% pa which is OK. I'm investing alongside that anyway.

 

[rigsby]

I have preferred bricks and mortar over the years but even that is at risk in the very near future.

Might have to look at firms who concentrate in medical damages claims......Ones that specialise in Vaccine side effects.

 

[markw]

Who was that? Interested to know, I work for a Lloyds syndicate and never saw this as an opportunity, I have just looked at charts for Tokio Marine and Hiscox and there is certainly a big increase from March to now, but they are still someway short of where they were January. I think this is a trend for most stocks. Hindsight hey, they always say buy in the dips but it takes balls of steel when dealing with something unprecedented like we are experiencing now. I did top up on some of my existing investments when the market had a sell off for t6he second lockdown but the drops and bounceback were small in comparison.

Will be interesting to see what happens to Hiscox's value in the next few months, i think the Business interruption court appeal is soon. They wrote a sizeable contingency book as well but that seems to have got off slightly better than others!

 

[Tangled up in Blue]

I remember a few years ago now my wife went to see our local Bank Manager Jordi ( a nice guy,friend of a friend).She went to ask his advice about shares to invest in.He suggested we put the money in a good matress.

 

[londonblue]

Couldn't agree more. I bought some shares in an insurance company I used to work for in March when they were at their lowest they had been for many a year. Today they are worth 84% more than I bought them for, but i'll keep them as they pay out pretty good dividends.

I work for a company that is a platform for people to invest their money. The minute we went into lockdown all the markets went into freefall. And the first thing people did was move their money out of the falling markets. In my mind that was the wrong decision. Markets were always going to bounce back up. If you have missed the boat and not moved out before the markets start to drop you might as well hold on, enjoy the ride and wait for the recovery.

My pension (invested in UK and US equities) was worth £69.5k on the 23/2/2020. The markets started to drop shortly afterwards. One month later it was worth £47.6k. If i'd have moved my monies from the equities I was in and into the "safe havens" of gold etc I would have moved out when my pension was at its lowest and not benefited from the bounce it has had since.

The markets gradually recovered and it took 3 months for my pension to get back to where it was. Today, with all of the news with the vaccines my pension is now worth £77k.

Years and years ago when I worked for an investment bank I used to follow their analysts and what they thought was going to happen. One of the perks of the job was a commission free trading account, which I kind of made use of.

One of the analysts was banging on about a Mexican bank who he thought were way under valued. He believed there were massive gains to be had over the next 6 months. Me and a colleague waded in, but instead of buying shares in the bank (and be exposed to the exchange rate risk to the Mexican Peso) we bought ADRs on the NYSE (with less exchange rate risk as they are in USD). The ADRs followed the price of the shares. We bought them at around $3 each. After getting on for 4-5 months they had hit $14, which was the top end that the analyst thought they'd reach in 6 months.

I said to my colleague that I was thinking of selling, and he thought it was a good idea, but said he was going to leave it a week. I went along with him.

In that week the bank were caught up in a massive Mexican banking fraud and the ADRs fell to around $1 each!

Thankfully I hadn't put that much in, and I found it quite funny. But there's a lesson to be learned there...

 

[Member]

My brother got on the crypto bandwagon very early. He is in a regular paying job but has paid off his mortgage (aged 33) and yesterday bought himself a nearly new RS5.

 

[Ricky Otto]

Will be interesting to see what happens to Hiscox's value in the next few months, i think the Business interruption court appeal is soon. They wrote a sizeable contingency book as well but that seems to have got off slightly better than others!

The appeal is going on now. I was watching the other day, as we are one of the 4 Lloyds syndicates contesting, and thought Ron was back in court haha. It is certainly interesting the growth Hiscox has seen with all this up in the air, almost as if some people know something we don't!
!

 

[Ricky Otto]

My fund Polar Technologies has made me 35% growth- now investing in a balanced managed fund for long term growth. I think you can't really look at sectors (unless you want to avoid them like oil and gas), but individual companies.

Pension through company is on 4% pa which is OK. I'm investing alongside that anyway.

I kind of agree and disagree, it is certainly about companies but finding the right company in a hot sector is always going to pay off. Easier said than done though. My portfolio is currently 28% up for the year, well since May really as that is when I started. A fund is certainly a safer bet but I am enjoying this like a hobby

 

[Ricky Otto]

My brother got on the crypto bandwagon very early. He is in a regular paying job but has paid off his mortgage (aged 33) and yesterday bought himself a nearly new RS5.

Absolutely love this! I made a modest amount in the 2017/18 boom but wanted in much earlier. It was only when coinbase came along with its protections and regulation that I was comfortable enough to invest. I was very fearful of a Mt Gox scenario! If I had more knowledge of bitcoin and had read up more I would have found safe ways of purchasing. I have massive admiration for the early adopters, I think they are quite visionary.

 

[Ricky Otto]

I have preferred bricks and mortar over the years but even that is at risk in the very near future.

Might have to look at firms who concentrate in medical damages claims......Ones that specialise in Vaccine side effects.

The taxation might force you to sell but i'd imagine your properties have grown in value and your return would be substantial. Certainly a lot better than leaving it in the bank!

 

[markw]

The appeal is going on now. I was watching the other day, as we are one of the 4 Lloyds syndicates contesting, and thought Ron was back in court haha. It is certainly interesting the growth Hiscox has seen with all this up in the air, almost as if some people know something we don't!
!View attachment 13411

Luckily my shop wasn't involved, so have been keeping an eye from the sidelines. The Hiscox growth is certainly an odd one!

That has to be a relation, the hair is magnificent!