A good month for silver, gold, copper and miners (but not for SMRs)!

 I hold the following stocks and ETFs listed in the table below in my Trading 212 accounts.

The current price change (last column) is calculated using the average price over approx. 30 days.

Invest in Pawn (gold)?

On 19th September 2025 I wrote a blog article 'Is Pawn good for you?'.

In that article I suggested that we take a look at FirstCash FCFS and Ramsdens RFX.

A free and viable alternative to the UK's Net Zero policy

If the UK became a CO2 Net Zero energy country, it will cost us many £Trillions and quosh all our industries - this policy is making the UK one of the most expensive countries in the world to live in.

We could insulate our houses better and save approx. 5% of CO2 emissions (much cheaper than buying a BEV). Eating 10% less meat would save 2% and 20% less waste food would also save 2%.

So we could reduce our emissions by at least 15% simply by insulating our houses better (and short payback period), wasting less food and eating less meat (e.g. eat pulses one day a week instead of eating a bit of a cow).

What if all developed world countries did this?

I asked CoPilot...

Trading 212 update 2026-01-16 + tips

Another good week and I am at an all-time high :-) Over my two accounts (£130k mainly DCA deposits, I am up £26k in 12 months = 20% unrealised gain).

I don't expect this to last however and still have £6k of cash ready for when the correction comes!

T212 Invest (£110k Deposit - 72% IRR)

This was up £2.6k (2%) over the week.

Company Stock picks for 2026

This list below comprises medium to long-term companies which are picked for a UK investor's 2026 portfolio.

The list was shared by the YouTube investor channel 'ISA Investment UK' who has built up his impressive portfolio from £422k to £1600k in just one year. Although he has used options quite a bit - he has over £300k in ETFs, £50k in crypto, £200 in options and £230k in cash - the rest (£800k) is invested in the following companies...

Trading 212 update 2026-01-09 + lessons learned in 2025

I have not reported my Trading 212 account progress for a few weeks as there was not much to report, so here is the 2026 New Year's update which is nicely up!

Trading 212 ISA (20K deposited on April 2025)

I use this account as my more shorter term trading, adventurous account.

Ideas for Finance and Value ETFs in 2026

The US economy and US dollar seem set to improve in 2026. Trump is calling for swingeing cuts in the Fed interest rate. This should be better for US stocks. US banks and credit card companies have not performed particularly well in 2025 for UK investors, partly because of the  USD/GBP Fx rate but this should change in 2026. The GBP\USD Fx rate should not change so much over 2026.

Investments for 2026 - it's a gas!

Data Centers require large amounts of electricity and the fuel needs to be clean and immediately available. Nuclear energy is the long term answer but that is still 6-10 years away and data centers need electricity now! The answer lies in building modular large scale natural gas generators.

Urgent - The value of Silver is exploding!

The spot price of silver seems to be rocketing in the last few days.

You can invest in physical silver or buy a physical silver fund (e.g. SLVP or SSLN) or buy a x2 or x3 leveraged ETF (e.g. £3SLV or $SLV3). 3SLV is up 150% in just one month. There is also the possibility of buying a Euro hedged fund such as OXA2.

My top ETFs for a 2026 UK investor's portfolio

The ETFs below are my current top favourites for a 2026 general investment portfolio for a UK investor.

My core ETFs as a UK-based (GBP) investor would be PSRU(dist.) FTSE UK and PSRW(dist.) FTSE All world. Value stocks should do well, so IWVG(dist.) is another 'safe' horse being an All World Value ETF which has shown good performance.

Trading 212 update 2025-12-19 + tips for 2026

A bit of a scary week, down all week and then a strong recovery on Friday. 

In this blog, I also explain some of my investment plans for 2026.

T212 ISA

My 20K ISA (opened April 2025) is looking better thanks to Friday...

FTSE, S&P 500 or NASDAQ 100 - which performed better over the last 1 and 5 years - you will be surprised!

and the winner is.... the FTSE RAFI ETF PSRU...

Here is a 5-year chart with some other popular ETFs for comparison...

Free eBook on Investing!

I just got a five star rating for my free eBook 'Start Investing Now!' which was nice.

If you found this blog article by accident and wondered if you should start investing (the sooner the better) then this book is for you - and it's FREE!

See my Payhip store page at https://payhip.com/SteveSi to get the free PDF download.

Note: If you like my free eBooks and find the content useful, you can always download another copy and pay whatever you want for it to buy me a coffee ;-)

Steve

If you would like to buy a more detailed book on investing for UK investors, please leave a comment. The new eBook will be only $5 and contain investing tips, trends, tax traps, mistakes (gotchas), etc. There will be no analysis expertise required - the aim is to outline how a typical, young (early 20's) UK worker can become a multimillionaire by the time they retire through sensible spending and slow and steady investing, taking full advantage of the UK tax system.

Best Mining shares for UK investors

Over the last 1, 3 and 6 months, mining ETFs and value ETFs have been performing well.

GIGB (acc) looks very good to me, or if you have a GIA account, then you maye prefer DMAD (dist.) although the fund size of DMAD seems very small it seems to have performed very well. Distributing mining ETFs seems to be quite rare.

Top ETFs in 2025 and JustETF.com guides

 Justetf.com have issued a number of comparison guides for 2025 results.

For UK tax payers, you will probably want an accumulating ETF inside your ISAs and SIPPs, but distributing ETFs inside a GIA account (e.g. Trading 212 Invest account) because this saves having to work out the ERI on all of your accumulating ETFs).

Note that these Justetf guides may not include hedged ETFs and may be filtered (not aimed at UK investors). For instance, compare a hedged S&P 500 with the best unhedged ETF for 2025

For 2026, I am using unhedged USA ETFs however.

Trading 212 update 2025-12-12 - it was all going so well until Friday!

Friday 12/12 started so well, but then it all went downhill in the afternoon, leaving me substantially down by 3% from last week.

T212 ISA

T212 Invest GIA

Tickers most affected by Friday's dip (GIA)

Tickers most affected by Friday's dip (ISA)

I think Tech is going to be very 'wobbly' and volatile next year. My current portfolio is Tech heavy at the moment but I am now interested in buying more commodity stocks.

My plan for 2026

I asked ChatGPT for the best energy tariff

I asked ChatGPT 

'If my electricity is 25.88p per unit and the standing charge is 43.66p for Tariff 1, and Tariff 2 is 24.96p per unit and standing charge is 62.22p, what would my usage need to be in kWhours for my bill to be the same under either tariff?'

It replied 'The usage needs to be approximately 20.17 kWh for the bill to be the same under either tariff.'

From the answer, it seems that one tariff would always be cheaper than the other as long as my usage was 20kWh or more which is easily surpassed as I use about 2000 kWh annually.

So I then asked:

'What would my bill be for one year of 2000 kWh of use under both tariffs?'

and got the reply:

Under Tariff 1, the annual bill would be approximately £676.96 (67695.9p), and under Tariff 2, it would be approximately £726.30 (72630.3p), assuming the standing charges are applied daily.

Simples! 

So I changed my Octopus electricity Tariff to the cheaper 12m fixed tariff since my annual usage will always be greater than a measly 20kWh!

Before I got a cheap Air Fryer (#Amazon ad), I used to put my small cooker oven on every day and my electric energy bill was over £900/yr, so the Air Fryer has easily paid for itself in just one year of use. If your loved ones don't have one already, why not buy them one for Christmas - they save electricity (esp. when you pre-microwave the veggies first in a small amount of water) and improve your diet because you can eat fresh food every day without needing to stand over the hob for ages.

Tip: If you or your relatives already have an Air Fryer, then these disposable paper liners (#ad) make a great gift - they save wear and tear on the caddy's non-stick surfaces and saves washing up! If you like them, you can get them cheaper from Ali Express.

If you have an elderly relative, an electric throw blanket makes a great Xmas gift. It saves energy bills and keeps them nice and warm all evening. Tip: Buy a dark colour as you won't need to wash it so often.

New! - How to check if a firm is a scam

The Financial Conduct Authority (fca.org.uk) have a new facility (Dec. 2025) on their website called Firm Checker.

If you want to check if a firm is legitimate and what it is legally allowed to do, then this will tell you.

It will also alert you to known 'clone' firms (firms of a similar name or firms pretending to be the real firm).

If you or a relative has been contacted by a firm offering you a 'deal', you should be able to check them out.

Tip: Clone firms are often hard to spot. The number that you are called by can be spoofed. You should find the firms website using a search engine, check that the site looks genuine (e.g. test out all links and pages) and then contact that firm using their email contact address and phone number and ask if the person who contacted you is actually an employee.

Alway pay by credit card (not debit card) even if only part payment is made.

Make an Excel spreadsheet to fetch and compare today's stock prices with the 30-day average

I asked the Claude AI to make an Excel macro that would get the current stock price and compare it with a 30 day average price and show me the changes in coloured cells (light or dark green and red). 

Here is what I got:

Trading 212 update 2025-12-05

My ISA and GIA portfolios gained a bit this week (£100+£1k). I have started to sell some of my smaller holdings (<£50) and also sold Regeneron Pharmaceuticals (triggered by a Stop Loss limit) for a profit. My main sell inside my ISA was of Sylvania Platinum which made a very small loss (it did not seem to be moving much over the last 2 months). I rebought Greatland Resources GGP in my ISA (£500 worth - currently 2% up).

I sold Regeneron Pharmaceuticals for a 10% profit!

I tipped and bought Regeneron in early November and in total bought £2k. I sold it on the 27th November for a £223 and 11% profit as the price started to drop and I had set a stop loss limit and so was stopped out.

Is Greatland Resources rebounding?

I bought GreatLand GGP at the end of September 2025 and sold in October for a quick 10% profit when it started to dip. It is a gold and copper miner.

I hung on to a small fraction however (about £20) so that I could easily track it in my Trading 212 ISA.

Trading 212 Update 2025-11-28 + Tips

My two Trading 212 accounts have recovered a lot this week and I am almost back up to the all-time highs of October. The contents of my portfolios are shown below:

£100K Invest GIA

Rolls Royce SMRs to be built in Wylfa Anglesey - not USA SMRs!

Although RR was the UK's preferred bidder, we had promised President Trump that the UK would invest in proven USA SMRs. It appears Mr Trump is pretty upset about it!

Tip - MBX Biosciences may be worth a look?

MBR has gone up over 100% recently and there has also been some insider buying. It has a target price of approx $60 and so seems undervalued.

Tip - buy Eli Lilly and/or Novo Nordisk?

About a month ago I invested in Eli Lilly and Novo Nordisk mainly because I think the weight loss drug market is exploding internationally.

EBooks sale now on (15-25% off)!

I have a special Black Friday sale on my eBooks on now (15% discount). Extra discount if you buy more than one. I'm almost giving them away.

Become an expert in Ventoy, E2B, grub4dos, USB booting, etc. My eBooks have an average 4.5 star rating. Some are free!

Click on the eBooks store link to get a bargain 😁 

Trading 212 Update 2025-11-21 + tips

Not a good week!

Best 'safer alternative' ETF for a retirement portfolio?

I retired early at the age of 58 due to redundancy. My work pension kicked in at age 60 and later my government pension at age 66.

I have been investing for gain since my 50's and due to inheritance from my parents as well as excess pension income, I have managed to build up a good sized portfolio.

How to pay less Capital Gains Tax in the UK (also Austria, Denmark and Switzerland)

If you sell an Accumulating ETF inside your GIA investment account, and exceed the current UK £3K annual tax free allowance, you will have to pay Capital Gains Tax on any gain that you made.

But, if you have not calculated the ERI then you may well be paying too much CGT because you could be declaring too high a gain!

Trading update 2025-11-14 + tips

Thursday and Friday saw a small correction which started to recover slightly late Friday.

T212 Invest portfolio (end Friday 14th Nov.)

My ISA account hasn't changed much

Share tips and up to £100 free offer + My Top Performers Pie

Join Trading 212 now for up to £100 free fractional share

Click on this link to sign up and get a free share worth up to £100.

Tips

My ETF top-ups today

The stock market has been down in the last few days, but now seems to be making a light recovery.

I have decided DCA in £1k each into IUCM, XDEV and ICDU.

Trading update 2025-11-07 + tips

Weekly progress report

Oh dear, it was all going so well...

A bad week this week, albeit a slight uplift late on Friday.

The table below shows the weekly stats for the last 9 weeks on my T212 accounts (ISA and GIA):

Buying a cheap Windows 10 Product Key for my new Windows 11 system

I have bought a new mainboard, CPU, RAM and M.2 drive in order to build a new Windows 11 system, but I wanted to keep my old Windows 10 system too. I had several spare ATX PSUs already.

These two large S&P 500 companies gained over 200% in the last 6 months!

Two giant S&P 500 companies have beaten Tesla, SOFI, Palantir, TSM, AMD, Intel, nVidia, etc. in the last 6 months but no one is talking about them! What is more they have a virtual monopoly on a very large market.

Trading 212 Update 2025-10-31 + tips and ideas

Weekly progress report

Another good week.

The table below shows the weekly stats for the last 8 weeks on my T212 accounts (ISA and GIA):

Future stock market volatility prediction & Trump's Crypto deals

If you are holding cash in your ISA or GIA Investment accounts at the moment, you may be hoping to buy in on a future dip.

Gold and Silver has undergone a correction recently. The S&P and Global indexes are up however.

ChatGPT has prepared the following event list for me:

Trading 212 Update 2025-10-24 + tips

 Another exciting week of ups and downs!

Weekly progress report

The table below shows the weekly stats for the last 7 weeks on my T212 accounts:

Avoid paying too much tax or too little tax on Accumulating ETFs (UK, Austria, Denmark, Switzerland)?

Accumulating ETFs don't pay out dividends, so you don't pay dividend tax on them - right?

Uhh - WRONG! - you may still need to declare and pay dividend tax each year to the tax man!

If you are a tax resident in Austria, Denmark, Switzerland or the UK you may be paying too much tax or not enough tax on your ETFs! Not only that, but you are probably not declaring your income correctly and you could wind up in trouble with the tax man (or tax woman)!

Does this apply to you?

Trading 212 Update 2025-10-17 - Trump's black Friday

Another exciting week!

I did some day trading by selling some shares that were dropping and then re-buying them at the bottom. I also have 5K in cash now.

Weekly progress report

The table below shows the weekly stats for the last six weeks on my T212 accounts:

My SMR Pie is up 20% in two weeks!

It seems the Nuclear SMR industry is now flavour of the month.

People are beginning to realise that wind and solar are not going to solve the energy crisis, it is more expensive than fossil fuels and too much wind and solar can actually destabilise the grid!

The world needs more electricity. Massive AI and Data centers need Gigawatts of power 24x7 and they need their own source of power.

The (only) viable answer we have left is to generate heat to drive good ol' steam turbines by using nuclear fission.  Since large reactors take about 10-15 years to plan and build, big companies and governments are looking to SMRs to save the day (see my previous article 'Investing in SMRs').

For anyone who wants to get to the truth about green energy and Net Zero - see this video (and others by Kathryn Porter)...

Final report on The Great Currency Hedge Experiment (2025-10-13)

Eight weeks ago on Monday 18th August I bought £50 worth of shares in 10 various hedged and unhedged ETFs.

The idea was to study what the real-world effect of holding currency-hedged ETFs is, when compared to holding unhedged equivalents. I also bought my favourite FTSE 100 RAFI ETF PSRU to compare this UK ETF with US ETFs just for fun.

Here are the 10 ETFs listed in order of descending unrealised gain after 8 weeks (ETF currency shown) - actual profit after selling in last column.

Trading 212 Update 2025-10-10 - Trump strikes again + tips!

Typical! - Just when it was looking like a bumper week, Trump sends out an X tweet at around 4 p.m. BST and the whole stock market dives!

Here is the picture for my T212 ISA after the dust settled on the morning of Saturday 11th (today). Some after-hours trading saw a slight uptick and a few more green squares started to appear late on in Friday's market...

UK Government are not committed to Rolls-Royce SMRs... yet!

Starmer has already signed deals with the USA for US SMRs to be built in the UK.

Many people think that Rolls-Royce RR SMRs will be built in the UK and elsewhere, and so they are investing in RR shares. However, this document is asking for justification on the use of RR SMRs in the UK although it seems US SMRs are already going ahead in the UK.

UK Government spends £860m on air-source heat pump grants!

The UK gov. is spending £860m on decarbonisation projects. Most of this money is being spent on replacing perfectly good gas boilers in public buildings with air-source heat pumps.

207 public sector organisations have been awarded grants for 245 heat decarbonisation and energy efficiency projects.

Trading 212 Update 2025-10-03 + more tips

This week has shown a very nice uptick. 

The table below shows the weekly stats for the last four weeks on my T212 accounts:

T212 Accounts

Deposit  Age      12 Sept.  19 Sept.  26 Sept. 03 Oct   Result(wk) (IRR since start)      

£20,000   6 mths  £24,700   £25,083   £24,619  £25,225  £631       (27% - 20k lump sum in April)

£70,000  14 mths  £76,474   £78,574   £78,415  £80,057  £1,698     (45% - DCA in chunks - 26k added Aug.)

Overall gain this week is +£2,329 (last week was -£622).

So my £90K T212 accounts (£20k ISA + £70K GIA) now total £105K (+£15,282 gain).

Top performers this week...

2025-10-02 Todays Stock risers

Stock market is up @ midday today 12:00 BST UK.

Of note are Ashtead Technology AT (8%), AMD 3.35%, COINbase (2%), ASML (3.6%), CoreWeave CRWV (2.7%) plus many others in the 1%-2% range.

Thales HO (defense company) is up 23% in 1 month, Siemens Energy ENR is up 11% in last week.

Nebius Group NV NBIS on NASDAQ is up 5% today and 78% in the last month due to a large deal with Microsoft...

Buy and Forget - a simple two ETF portfolio!

Many people would like to invest for 5 years or more but do not want to actively trade - they just want to invest a lump sum (and maybe add to it every month or 3 months).

Many years ago I decided to entrust an inheritance to Fisher Investments. They have an annual charge of approx. 1.5%/yr and there is also an initial on-boarding fee for life planning, etc. Fisher very much believe that, provided you have other means of support (e.g. adequate pension and you own your own house), 100% equity investment is best (no bonds or cash). Their fund is basically the same as the SWDA MSCI Core Global ETF but with a few tweaks depending on the current economic climate. For instance, because of Trump's election, they increased their portfolio weighting of European stocks.

As you can see from the charts below, Fisher's fund (Purisima Global Total Return B - shaded blue line) has basically followed the SWDA ETF.

Free investment resource + tips

HelloStocks provide a free list of potentially good investment holdings here.

I cannot vouch for their accuracy or integrity, but it does seem to provide lists of companies suitable for investment depending upon different criteria.

P.S. I have added some extra companies to my 'nuclear' blog article here - see the 'Other possible candidates' section. Some of these have shown +400% and +600% gain in the last year! I have made an 'SMR Pie' in Trading 212 and invested in most of these for the long term as I foresee a desperate need for large amounts of electricity to supply AI and data farms as well as EVs in the next 10 years. In 2027, some SMRs should finally be working and demonstrating their cost effectiveness and efficiency. More SMRs will follow. There will be a need for Uranium and the special fuels that are needed, so no matter which SMR designs win the race, the companies supplying and making the fuel will rocket in value as demand will exceed supply - at least that's my theory!