Since I last posted Iāve invested in both Plum and in Celo. In the case of Plum it has promise and if they extend out to Whatsapp they could really take off. Thereās not much to Celo but I see they funded and Iām anxious to invest in Fintech where I can as hardly any make themselves available to the crowd.
Are there any other ways to get a piece of the Fintech action? It seems us smaller investors canāt really get close but I would be interested in joining up with other likeminded people to increase clout.
I also invested in plum but thought celo was a bit too waffly. In general crowdfunding, particularly FinTech, has a huge upside but little downside especially when taking tax incentives into account. I work in finance and it surprises me how little is known about crowdfunding.
Thereās an interesting bunfight going on about the terms of Plumās previous convertible debt round now that their current round is triggering the equity conversion Plum | EIS Crowdfunding Investment | Seedrs (the āConversion price / follow-on pricingā thread and you probably need to be logged in to Seedrs to read it). Several earlier investors deeply unhappy and saying theyāll not invest again in Plum or other crowdfunding opportunities again.
My takeaway is: early stage cos are high risk, obviously. And some investment mechanisms - like convertible debt - are harder for the private investor to understand. So you have to invest accordingly.
Tandem: yeah. Missed out on Monzo, got some Tandem instead and, oh. Iām not sure if I can steel myself enough to write about my worst investment though.
Yes - that is my best investment too so far assuming some opportunity to cash out at the current valuation in the future - invested in all rounds from EFP2 to current. If Iād have had more opportunity to take money out then I probably would have done so kind of glad that the cash out opportunities have been so restricted! Also blame the success of BD for my addiction to equity crowdfunding which has included some highlights of Monzo, Revolut & Freetrade but also Vulpine which was a complete crash and burn!
Based on current share price my best crowdfunded investment so far was one that didnāt even hit itās target on crowdcube. I bought in to Solar 350 directly after they pulled the campaign. share price then was Ā£2.50. Current share price Ā£24 so itās almost a 10 bagger (or even better if you take into account I claimed 50% SEIS)
maybe freetrade can beat that, looking good so far since I got in at round 2
Only crowdfunded investment Iāve done that has actually exited was e car club, I would have held longer if I had the choice but I did triple my money.
worst crowdfunded, I donāt know yet
worst overall, probably playing with leveraged ETFs a few years back. I didnāt fully understand them at the time.
Easyjet - Invested as I regularly fly with them (cheap with lots of destinations). Topped up several times after brexit, making insane gains
Hotel Chocolat - Who can say no to high quality chocolate?
Terrible Investments
Ultimate Products - Bought right after the 1st profit warning that reduced the share price by over 60%. Thought it was a good opportunity to make quick bucks (until the 2nd profit warning that further decreased the SP and my investment by >40%)
WPP - Bought as I wanted a safe, stable company with a decent dividend yield. Not so stable after allā¦
Nike. I bought when the stock was around $50 in October, and made 40% since.
Worst:
A random crypto coin. Iāve bought for the impressive amount of Ā£50 following the advice of a friend. This is the sin of āfollowing othersā from the post. Iāve wanted to learn about the various cryptos outside the mainstream, so not a total waste. I find I learn best when I have at least a bit of skin in the game.
I donāt follow that particular one anymore - but in my view, most meaningful cryptos broadly follow the trend Bitcoin has. So probably . If anyone has better data though, do chime in.
Best.
Ethereum, Netflix, Vanguard Lifestrategy 60 (all +40-50%). With eth and nflx I learned that the market is essentially random from my perspective. Vanguard gave me the habit of investing regularly and thinking long-term. I guess also a critical illness policy, taken out in my 20s - at the time I thought āWell, Iām young and immortal but ok why notā - which gave a later bad event a silver lining.
Best. And Worst.
1997: I worked at Football365. 18 months later, the company had IPOed and the gain was, er, life-changingly big. Like many others working at dotcoms back then I felt like a master of the universe. And then the stock market fell over horribly in March 2000. I ended up with about a 100% gain, but the drop in value from what it had been made it feel like the worst of losses. But I learned so much working there and made a career, so from the distance of 2018 itās a win.
Worst.
2008: After my co had a good year I invested - I will weep if I say how much, so letās just say āa large sumā - in a property bridging loan fund a banking person said was safe and high performing. It did very well for several months until, suddenly, it didnāt and collapsed. I lost a lot of money, and learned that if the amounts are big I should invest only in things I understood, that I needed to understand risk better. These days I think about what would āminimise my future regretā in future investments.
I worked in video games in the early 2000s. Weād just finished making a PlayStation game for Disney in late 2001 and the team all got a bonus of about Ā£500 each. I was young, lacking forward planning and a super technophile, so I was really excited to be able to invest my whole bonus in one of those new-fangled DVD players. It was about the size of a desktop PC and looked amazing under my TV and I didnāt care that there were only a couple of dozen films available for it because I was able to buy around six hundred over the following couple of years.