What’s the best to invest in currently , new or old? And how much are people putting on £ currency
You need to make your own investment decisions. How much you gamble (stock markets are inherently risky) and on what is your call. There’s often more risk associated with new listings (be they traditional IPOs or SPACs) but events such as pandemics can impact everything.
Do your research and decide for yourself is a boring answer, but it is very much on and up to you.
buy stuff that goes up, and if it doesn’t go up don’t buy it
Clearly the whole point of investing
Welcome to the world of investing! I highly recommend reading the Monevator blog to start, they give a good guide to getting started. You might try starting with their Investing Lessons series.
Personally, I got started in investing by putting money into low-risk things first, to build a solid and stable foundation, and then added layers of increasingly risky types of investments.
So I first set aside an ‘emergency fund’, which is just a bank account, to make sure I had several months’ of expenses covered in case of emergency. Most people advise keeping 3 to 6 months’ worth of your normal outgoing expenses in cash, but I actually aim for 12 months because I am self-employed so my income is less reliable than someone with a stable job. That’s the most boring layer, but I think it’s important to have a solid foundation to fall back on in case anything goes wrong.
My second layer is made up of stock and bond ETFs and funds, and I have 80% of my money invested in these. The stock funds are baskets of multiple companies, and because they are broad collections of stocks, they are safer than investing in individual companies directly. An ETF or fund could have hundreds of companies in it, so if any one company crashes and burns, it doesn’t hurt you very much, but of course the other side of that is that if a company takes off and does really well, it’s only one of many companies that you own a piece of. But it is difficult to know in advance which company will do well and which won’t, so many people advocate buying a broad global market tracker so you get a small piece of as many companies as possible. Have a look at Low-cost index funds and ETFs that will save you money - Monevator for good suggestions of ETFs and funds.
My third layer is made up of picking individual companies. It’s hard to pick good companies, because small individual investors like us don’t really have enough information to do it well. You might like a company because they have a good product, but having a good product is only part of success – for a company to do well in the stock market, it has to be financially well run and their back-office functions also have to be more efficient than their competitors, and those are really hard for us outsiders to assess. And even if you can evaluate one company thoroughly, you never know if one of their competitors might be better, or might be about to unleash something that will make them more competitive. If you spend a lot of time researching companies, you can find out some of these things, but it’s not easy. Well, if it were easy, we’d all be millionaires, wouldn’t we?
One major warning I would give you: be wary of jumping on bandwagons. People sometimes see that a stock has increased in price recently and think they should get a piece of the action. And while that can work sometimes, for a while, what you really want to do is buy a stock before it shoots up, not afterwards!
Good luck and DYOR! (Do your own research!)
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