Beginner with £200

It’s just a method I used when I started and continue to use now to a good degree of success. The topic is where to start and how to find options, this is my method and starting point :call_me_hand:

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Trying to figure out if having a favourite financial performance metric will improve my life :thinking:

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ETF’s for certain - moderate growth, diversification, steady and maybe some dividends to start seeing a return. I wouldn’t pull all the money into one stock.

Also when you say “long term” and “short term” would be worth knowing what that is, tangibly. It can vary and therefore influence your calls.

Hopefully my channel helps

https://youtube.com/infantinvestors

@MegaRhinoKing - one more thing which @saf has raised which is a really important point.

Imagine you invest £200 today and tomorrow it fell to £190. Then next week slipped to £180 and the following week £175. After 2 months it hovered in the late £170s before slipping again to the £160s. What would you do? It feels awful.

Between September 2018 and February 2019 the value of my portfolio dropped by over 20%. I sat on horrible “losses” for months. Today they are higher than the value at September 2018. However I never had any losses as I never sold. Instead I carried on buying what I could and some of those investments have jumped 25% as I had bought them at the bottom. Don’t fall to the panic selling!

I highly recommend you join a website (investing.com is a start) and create a portfolio of what you would do if you were given £10,000. Do what you would do if it was real. You will learn so much from it and won’t lose a penny. We had to do this at uni in my finance course. I still clearly remember some of the things I learned from that exercise.

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Very true.

People underestimate the emotional side of investing (i.e managing them) is probably of equal importance to your investment choices.

Feels easier to manage the longer you’re in the market and more diversified you are - but I wonder how I will react when the next recession hits. :frowning:

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Indeed.

Admittedly crowdfunded rather than publically traded, but Sugru is a brilliant example of this difference. A great product, used and loved by many - but the business all went wrong/was caught up in difficult circumstances and investors made a huge loss.

Responding to the OP now: It’s fair to say that having a company you’re interested in can be a useful starting point. But that’s all it is - a starting point. It’s important to investigate and do due diligence on quite how they actually stack up before investing any money in them.

My own journey at the moment is primarily ETFs, with some money thrown into indivdual companies here and there to see how I get on. In the future I’ll find I can either trust myself to take risks, or I should keep building my ETF portfolio instead - whichever I find actually works best for me.

Just jumping in here to ask what part of the investing.com website you use to do a “dummy run” of investing?

I don’t want to be an emotional investor (newbie) so that sounds useful to get some more context of what could happen

Just sign up for free and then under portfolio create a holdings and just add stocks. It also allows you to create multiple portfolios and watch lists if you want to try different strategies.

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Well said @Rollingskies :+1:

Personally, I’ve never bought into diversified ETFs but thats just a personal preference to decide exactly what I’m investing my money into. I also started with £1k rising to £1.5k which I deemed a pretty satisfactory sum for individually picking and diversifying my portfolio enough.

The infrastructure fund is actually pretty good, I mean look at their portfolio: good mix of mature, varied companies in a number of countries (also a few renewable firms which I always like), and 3i has a pretty good track record.

At £200 it does become more difficult to safely diversify unless you stick to penny stocks, of which there are about two at the moment. Depends what you want your money to do at the end of the day: easiest way to play “short term” is usually earnings, like Sainsbury’s today. Freetrade will get loads more unique and interesting ETFs and trackers in the near future though.

Could you potentially share some?

It was really just basic principles of investing. How they moved up and down, stocks being more volatile than others, bonds v stocks, big companies v smaller ones and how when I came to “sell” I didn’t want to but made a loss as a result on some of these depending on the state of play on that day. How stocks rise and fall generally and importance of diversification etc

Firstly It’s important to decide on your goals. The advice others have given about ETF’s is excellent financially but will you be learning much? In life’s precarious path the best learning comes from ‘failure’ or rather what you learn and develop from that moment of ‘failure.’ If you’re young and just starting out I’d council to keep the £200 safe for now and read, read, and read again (Naked Trader off eBay for about £2 is a good start) and only then take the plunge. Most importantly DYOR! Best wishes

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The question I would ask is where is the next £200 coming from? You should set up a standing order, however small, and gradually accumulate funds. At this stage this is far more important than what you choose to invest in. Money only makes money given sufficient amounts, so you need to build a pot first. Below 10k say you will not make any significant money.

When considering what to invest in I’d seriously consider investing your first 10k at least in around 3000 large companies around the world with a global etf. It’s boring but it works.

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For such a small portfolio and as a new investor, I would suggest doing some reading…

GOOGLE something like UK top 10 dividend shares, read that and that may give you some ideas…

I have several portfolios with different brokers, and out of necessity have to follow different strategy for each.

Also, I seem to recall someone telling me that no individual shareholding should be more than 3 % of your portfolio. With a small portfolio, that is quite difficult, but becomes easier.

I also buy to hold. I do not trade.

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OP, put it in an index fund and forget about it

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Beginner here guys, Thank you all for great pieces of advice as it helped me also. you must try once and let me know if it really working for you also.

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Sorry if mentioned, but Aviva have a pretty good dividend. A smaller one is due in Aug.

The current share price is pretty low. Look into them.

Also apologies if mentioned, but Simply Wall St is a great place to do some research: https://simplywall.st/r?ref=260FEAED

The whole market is cheap right now.

I’m not going to share my personal opinion on this of course (Freetrade’s team is not authorised to give advice) but that’s debatable, there’s been some discussion about it here, for example -

Are you starting to think that the (US) Market is possibly beginning to look a little expensive?

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