[tomtom]

That sounds familiar to my experience with crypto and day trading in the past.

Got sick of watching the prices all the time. Became all consuming.

Never dabbled much though.

[shark]

Ah hadn't noticed this.. just started a new thread..

Mods could you either merge this with the new thread, or delete the new one?

Merged 

[JohnM]

Interesting thread! I have dabbled in and out of investing over the last 10 years based on disposable income and motivation but have got back into it in the last year or so. Like a lot of people I don't have a strategy per se but I try and convince myself I am making an informed decision! When you move away from safe lower yield investments it is more of a mindset of not being too risk adverse, having no emotional attachment to money and having enough that you can afford to lose some. My goal is to try and increasingly cover my current consultancy day rate with investments but I am a long way away from that at the moment. I have achieved that more and more this year but still way too infrequently. Sometimes I will make double in a day and other days nothing or minus.

From the mindset perspective it can often be seeing opportunity when 95% of the population see problems or risk. For example, when the Coronavirus started impacting Europe I start investing in the main contenders for vaccine development. When the press started reporting the issues with storing and distributing the vaccine I invested in firms with cold storage and distribution capabilities. However, I find it hard to get into that mind set and often you look back in hindsight and realise you missed a good opportunity.

Sometimes it is good too look at the broader trends and popular stocks e.g. Tesla, and think about other stocks that could go up in association rather than investing in Tesla itself. I avoided Tesla as I came in too late and it looked like a bubble to me. However, I thought with the wider trend in EV development it would be good to invest in lithium stocks so pumped a load of money into that. I was even invited to vote for the board meeting of Chemical and Mining Co. of Chile the other day!

At the moment I am just investing in different types of stocks each month with as much as I can save. This month was semi-conductors and next month will be bio-tech! I also read that the Swiss stock exchange is opening up to the UK in a bilateral deal so bought some stock on that as it might get pumped up next month when it opens up to London.

Most of the stuff I am investing in is too diversified to make high daily yields but I will probably hold most for up to 3 years or longer. Most of my biggest day earnings have been trading crypto swings. Buying dips in stuff like Stellar, XRP Ripple and Ether and selling on the rise. It has been more guess work of when to sell but I seem to be way less greedy than other people I know who do similar and get out way before them.

Having said all that my mate who just put all his money in TSLA has made 5 times more than me so I am probably wasting my time!
     

[RobK]

Maybe slightly off topic but what platforms are people using? I have so far stuck to the usual biggies (HL, II, IG) just because they are known beasts. Have people tried the zero commission/fee sites such as e-toro, trading 212 etc? Are the spreads acceptable? Any other issues to consider?

[nik at work]

I hold a few stocks but trade fairly infrequently. I just use my banks stock trading service for simplicity. Almost certainly not the cheapest but convenient, if I was making regular trades I’d probably take a closer look but for now it just works.

For crypto I am using CoinCorner which seems very expensive. I’m looking to move but not sure what to... lots of “can’t get your money out of them” stories... any recommendations?

I got wiped out a bit at the end of 2019 (not through investing, just a “life” financial whammy) coupled with corona based work issues meant 2020 didn’t have much free money to work with.

I have some boring steady investments that will do nothing exciting or alarming over the next however many years but should keep growing over the long term.

I made half a dozen punts during Covid, most have gone up 50-100% since I invested. A couple of finance companies and EasyJet I managed to buy at the very bottom.

Bloody Costain has remained flat, I hope it will eventually get going but for now it’s my bogey investment.

All my investments are fairly small. I’ve stuck to FTSE250 and above companies.

I also have a stake in a private company that may be getting floated soonish perhaps... this is hopefully my equivalent to what Pete has done, but probably not....

Bitcoin has been my biggest winner by far, a generally long term approach has multiplied my initial investment several times over. Trading on the volatility has been less successful, probably just breaking even tbh. Wish I’d been in a position to invest more when I started, don’t think I’d have maxed out a credit card (bold move Pete) but would certainly have put in the bulk of “spare cash” had there been any... hey ho.

I’m a very very small fry investor, having a bit of fun with no real idea what I’m doing. If I make a bit all well and good, but can lose it all with no great ill effect.

[36chambers]

For crypto I am using CoinCorner which seems very expensive. I’m looking to move but not sure what to... lots of “can’t get your money out of them” stories... any recommendations?

For crypto to fiat I use coinbase. I think they charged me about 0.8% for my recent sales, but at the rate prices are changing that value is just lost in the noise. Once in GBP it's free and instant to transfer the money to my bank account, which is great.

For non-fiat trading, Binance still seems to be the most popular. That's what I used in the past, although having gone back to it this year their current UI feels a bit messy.

[36chambers]

Wish I’d been in a position to invest more when I started, don’t think I’d have maxed out a credit card (bold move Pete) but would certainly have put in the bulk of “spare cash” had there been any... hey ho.

Fucked off that it's tripled in value since then, but hey ho.

Got out a bit too early and it’s since gone up even more but hey ho.

Rule no. 3 of investing:
Don't think about woulda, coulda, shoulda.

But I agree, hey ho.

[mburke]

Boring I know, but for the most part people are just better off buying things like this;

https://www.hl.co.uk/funds/index-tracker-funds

Its too much work investing in individual stocks, and often we just buy stocks we've heard about - which usually means the gains have already been had.

[webbo]

Is the above spam first post and a link to buy something.

[mburke]

hahaha nah, it's just a link to a brokerage site. Hargreaves Lansdown

[Falling Down]

I bought a whole bitcoin for approx $400 around 2013/14. Did it on my work computer and email. Computer got nicked and I couldn’t remember the exchange I used. C’est la vie. 

[Fultonius]

Maybe slightly off topic but what platforms are people using? I have so far stuck to the usual biggies (HL, II, IG) just because they are known beasts. Have people tried the zero commission/fee sites such as e-toro, trading 212 etc? Are the spreads acceptable? Any other issues to consider?

I always used coinbase, and coinbase pro for day trading getting my self stressed.

I'm done on crypto until PoS is released, might consider joining a staking pool. Maybe we should have a UKB Ether Staking Pool? 32 ETH required iirc.

[SA Chris]

I bought a whole bitcoin for approx $400 around 2013/14. Did it on my work computer and email. Computer got nicked and I couldn’t remember the exchange I used. C’est la vie. 

Could be worse

https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2021/jan/14/man-newport-council-50m-helps-find-bitcoins-landfill-james-howells

[seankenny]

As chance would have it I read this description of Bitcoin yesterday: “Imagine if keeping your car running 24/7 produced solved Sodukus that you could trade for heroin”.

[205Chris]

Almost 3 years old but worth a watch:

[Ru]

I bought a whole bitcoin for approx $400 around 2013/14. Did it on my work computer and email. Computer got nicked and I couldn’t remember the exchange I used. C’est la vie. 

Could be worse

https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2021/jan/14/man-newport-council-50m-helps-find-bitcoins-landfill-james-howells

And

https://www.newsweek.com/man-has-two-login-attempts-left-access-220-million-bitcoin-before-its-all-lost-1560984

[MischaHY]

Can anyone recommend a good guide/literature for getting into investing? Been thinking about it the last few years as we started to have a little more disposable income. Really keen to learn more.

[tomtom]

As chance would have it I read this description of Bitcoin yesterday: “Imagine if keeping your car running 24/7 produced solved Sodukus that you could trade for heroin”.

That’s a funny description.... the Heroin bit is downright wrong in its implication...

I was having a twitter discussion with a colleague last week about the energy used to produce bitcoin - in comparison to their precious things. I think (I really can’t be arsed to check) but BTC is about about 30% of the energy used to refine and smelt gold (though the energy used to make aluminium is approximately 3 times that for gold!).

Gold is a good comparison to BTC IMHO, there is a limited quantity on our planet - ever dwindling in supply and the cost of extraction is rising accordingly. This really only covers Gold as a currency or item of desire, as gold does have some industrial uses whereas BitCoin is worthless if you can’t spend it!

[Fultonius]

As chance would have it I read this description of Bitcoin yesterday: “Imagine if keeping your car running 24/7 produced solved Sodukus that you could trade for heroin”.

That’s a funny description.... the Heroin bit is downright wrong in its implication...

I was having a twitter discussion with a colleague last week about the energy used to produce bitcoin - in comparison to their precious things. I think (I really can’t be arsed to check) but BTC is about about 30% of the energy used to refine and smelt gold (though the energy used to make aluminium is approximately 3 times that for gold!).

Gold is a good comparison to BTC IMHO, there is a limited quantity on our planet - ever dwindling in supply and the cost of extraction is rising accordingly. This really only covers Gold as a currency or item of desire, as gold does have some industrial uses whereas BitCoin is worthless if you can’t spend it!

Precisely why I feel Ethereum (using Proof of Stake), is vastly superior than Bitcoin. Bitcoin mining takes 77 TWH/year. UK total electricity consumption is 323 TWH/yr.   Bonkers!

I'm almost tempted to buy a small amount again (less than last time) and take it offline in a cold wallet and ignore it. I very nearly did that in June and really wish I had.

[RobK]

Can anyone recommend a good guide/literature for getting into investing? Been thinking about it the last few years as we started to have a little more disposable income. Really keen to learn more.

Not sure on literature (there's probably loads out there) but lots of platforms allow you to open a demo account to have a play and get a feel for things without actually having to put down your cold hard cash.

[Bradders]

Almost 3 years old but worth a watch:

Great video that, thanks for sharing. The advertisement for a pump and dump scheme is jaw dropping! Do that with equities and you'll be going to prison.

[MischaHY]

Can anyone recommend a good guide/literature for getting into investing? Been thinking about it the last few years as we started to have a little more disposable income. Really keen to learn more.

Not sure on literature (there's probably loads out there) but lots of platforms allow you to open a demo account to have a play and get a feel for things without actually having to put down your cold hard cash.

Thanks, wasn't aware of that. There's certainly a wealth of information out there so the main thing I'm interested in is a deeper dive on strategy etc 😀 When it comes to things like this I have a tedency towards hardcore geeking out before doing anything 😆

[Bradders]

Can anyone recommend a good guide/literature for getting into investing? Been thinking about it the last few years as we started to have a little more disposable income. Really keen to learn more.

Not sure on literature (there's probably loads out there) but lots of platforms allow you to open a demo account to have a play and get a feel for things without actually having to put down your cold hard cash.

Demo accounts might be useful for getting to grips with how the given platform works, but they're really not designed for learning about investing at all.

Mischa - I'd recommend Boring Money as a good place to start. Loads of useful info on getting started.

https://www.boringmoney.co.uk/

[petejh]

I'll post up quite a few long posts over the next week or so. To start I'll highlight my biggest investing disasters as I think most investors who get into it seriously are going to experience losses as well as gains and it's the losses that teach you best. Don’t worry, I’ve had many significant wins too! I’ll add some info on current good ones later.

I’ve grown my experience over the years and learned about which different styles of investing suit me best. I mainly focus on what interests me the most, and I love to research. My main focusses are the junior mining and exploration sector: gold, copper, silver, nickel and zinc; innovate tech companies involved in the forthcoming green revolution (more later), and small biotech. I'll go into them in another post.

But first the significant losses!..

I started investing in my twenties during the dot.com bubble of the mid-late 90s. New communications and data handling infrastructure was springing up in all major cities to support the internet age. I didn't have much of a clue about investing to begin with, just liked the idea of trying to turn my money into more money. I invested £8k in a fibre optic company named Fibrenet, they were rolling out fibre-optic carrier ring networks in London and Frankfurt.  My investment rose to £36k within a year or two, I had no idea about what a fair value for the company was,  and no idea about the markets, sentiment, or fundamentals or anything really. I just assumed the shares would continue to go up like those big companies did. Two years or so later the shares crashed down to earth when the bubble popped and I eventually sold out for the almost exactly what I’d paid for them. The ‘London Carrier Ring and ‘Frankfurt Carrier Ring’ still form part of the backbone of internet connectivity in those cities today I think.

Rubicon. This is one of the most infamous recent stories in the gold mining industry. Rubicon were a Canadian gold miner and owner of the Phoenix project in Red Lake Ontario. In late 2014 I bought in on hype as they approached the milestone of first production, I built my investment to approx £30k. All was looking rosy – many very large institutional investors were conned too – but things turned sour overnight when the company released an updated resource estimate in late 2015 which downsized the mine’s resources by 80%. The stock crumpled, investors lost hundreds of millions – including many Canadian pension funds. I still own my Rubicon shares today, they’re currently worth £52. Rubicon changed their name to Battle North Gold and they are on track for first gold pour from the phoenix mine later this year, with a very much reduced size of resource..
Interestingly, I noticed that an Irish gold mining company, called Conroy Gold, last year hired a new non-exec director of exploration, one Howard Bird. The same director of exploration in charge at Rubicon at the time it went sour. Conroy are flying due to their discovery in NI and joint venture, but I won't be touching them.
Story of Rubicon here: https://financialpost.com/commodities/mining/lessons-from-the-meltdown-of-rubicon-minerals-corp
https://www.northernontariobusiness.com/industry-news/mining/rubicon-minerals-seeks-to-bury-a-dubious-past-2360805

Molycorp. I built up £25k in this US rare earths miner between 2014-2015. The shares were on a roll due to China restricting global sales of rare earths and increasing demand from the green energy and defence industries in the US. However Molycorp soon began to struggle, due to China changing policy and allowing cheap rare earths to be ‘smuggled’ onto the market. Also my research was inadequate - I failed to understand that the rare earths Molycorp were mostly mining, Lanthanum and Cerium, were the cheapest and least in-demand elements in contrast to much more valuable neodynium and prasodymiun (plus others) that are rocking horse shit in comparison and in demand for alloys and powerful magnets used in defense and green energy.
Also, processing of the rare earths involved sending them across the Pacific to Chinese processors, as the US was and is poorly equipped for rare earths processing. Something the US DoD is currently trying to change via development deals with other rare earths companies in the US. The Chinese turned the screw and Molycorp went bust in 2017. I lost every penny but really should have heard the music far sooner. Part of the story here: https://www.defensenews.com/opinion/commentary/2019/11/12/the-collapse-of-american-rare-earth-mining-and-lessons-learned/
The lessons learned for me were that proper in-depth research is crucial, and to know the product and its worth.

[petejh]

Tier 3 is the speculation stuff and what I guess is probably of most interest here. Think what Pete did but with nowhere near the same levels of commitment! I have been slowly doing more of this recently though with the view at my age (late 20s) I can afford to take on more risk than I was previously doing. I have had various degrees of success with this, ranging from the utterly disastrous to the mildly successful. I have never put more than 0.75% of my total assets into any one deal, although this has slowly been creeping upwards. I can guarantee I will never do anything on the level of what Pete has done. I am full of admiration, while being totally aware that I would have called him a complete and utter fool for doing so beforehand.

Hey Rob.

I can't tell the full story here for fear of incriminating, but just to say I wasn't flying totally blind. You can use your imagination.. Luckily when the opportunity presented itself I'd learned enough over the past 20 years to know what I was looking at, and knew that it wasn't the type of opportunity that comes along in many lifetimes of investing. So I was pretty confident with the risk. Also if I'd lost everything it wouldn't really have put me on the street, I'd have been OK. I think these opportunities probably float past us fairly often but it's impossible to see them or make use of them most of the time.