Ramsdens (RFX) agrees to GBP203 Million takeover by FirstCash

I had posted a few blog articles on buying pawn brokers Ramsdens and  FirstCash because these businesses usually do well when the gold price is high and times are hard (people need cash quickly).

Is Pawn good for you - 19th Sept 2025

Invest in Pawn (gold) - 23rd January 2026

and told you I bought £500 of RFX in my 23rd May 2026 blog

Ramsdens has just shot up 30% due to the news that FirstCash is buying Ramsdens.

Trading 212 £193k portfolio update + tips

A great week for my Trading 212 portfolio, gaining over £10k in a week!

£140k deposited over 2 years shows a £53k uncrystallised profit

The Hormuz  'memorandum of misunderstanding' helped a lot, and also the US stock market being closed on Friday helped too!

I have set up stop sells on many of my ISA stocks so that should the market fall on Monday, I will try crystalise my profit. I will buy back in when prices are low again.

Invest GIA (IRR 104%)

ISA (IRR 53%)

I made a few minor trades during the week. The main one was to sell Sandisk at $1977 for a quick £60 profit as it looked like it was falling (but in fact it continued to rise another 1%).

Is Tech now overpriced?

We have more AI IPOs to come and the picks and shovels companies (Micron, Hynix, Seagate, WD, Intel, AMD, nVidia, etc.) seem to be back in favour as many people are beginning to think that AI companies and companies who have invested heavily in AI will have problems actually building the data centres, powering them and especially making a profit from them.

There must be an awful lot of memory, disks and CPUs sitting in warehouses that are destined for data centres but they may never actually get used. Higher-end CPUs/GPUs will be losing value as they are superseded by more recent hardware which is cheaper to run and requires less infrastructure.

Large companies who are currently buying AI as SaaS (and paying hefty subscription fees) are now beginning to want to build their own AI servers so that they are in control of their own AI service and cost constraints.

Companies like HP, Dell and Lenovo may be able to pick up the unutilised AI data centre hardware components quite cheaply and sell them on into the retail enterprise server market.

I am very worried that pure AI SaaS providers will never be profitable and they are asking the retail investor market to fund their folly and then sell their shares and leave the retail investors holding the baby. But I could be wrong.

I don't think the large volume AI users care if they use Deepseek, Claude, ChatGPT or Gemini - what they do care about a lot, is the 'cost of compute'. I think the capital costs of AI will come down and the energy costs will come down too as better, cheaper and more efficient hardware is developed. At the moment, the AI 'dealers' are giving us free or cheap, highly addictive drugs. Once we are hooked, we will then become dependent on them. There will be drug wars, but in the end, it will be a price competitive 'commodity' market.

Packaging is the bottleneck!

Although silicon chip factories can produce more wafers, the chips still need to be packaged. Apparently, there is a big bottleneck here, as most chip packaging is done offshore.

Let us look at a few packaging companies...

Amkor has grown 358% in a year and shows no signs of slowing down!

ASE (ASX) can be bought only in a T212 Invest account - but it has shown similar growth.

1. Foundries & IDMs (Integrated Device Manufacturers)

• Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. (TSMC): Dominates the market; Nvidia alone has reserved roughly 60% of TSMC's CoWoS packaging allocation.
  • Capacity Increase: Growing advanced packaging at a massive 80% compound annual growth rate (CAGR). TSMC is aggressively ramping up two new specialized packaging sites in Taiwan and is establishing an advanced packaging site alongside its Arizona foundry complex to support localized US assembly by 2027. [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6]
• Intel Corporation (INTC): Operates extensive internal packaging setups in New Mexico (US), Kulim, and Penang (Malaysia).
  • Capacity Increase: Intel is expanding packaging availability to external customers and is qualifying its EMIB-T packaging tech for massive client volume ramps through the latter half of 2026. [1, 2, 3]
• Samsung Electronics (Samsung): Launching a complete "turnkey" ecosystem that bundles memory, foundry nodes, and proprietary I-Cube advanced packaging together.
  • Capacity Increase: Building out entirely new HBM packaging infrastructure across South Korea, Taiwan, and Singapore, which are scheduled to scale aggressively through 2026 and 2027. [1, 2]

2. Pure-Play OSATs (Assembly & Test Specialists)

• ASE Technology Holding (ASE): The global OSAT market leader, controlling a 15.2% revenue share of advanced packaging via its robust 2.5D and 3D solutions.
  • Capacity Increase: Expanding localized footprints and working in close technical lockstep with TSMC to absorb downstream "on-substrate" chip assembly. [1, 2]
• Amkor Technology (AMKR): A premier US-headquartered OSAT provider focusing on high-density fan-out (HDFO) packaging.
  • Capacity Increase: Amkor has tripled its global capital expenditures budget. Its massive new manufacturing campus in Peoria, Arizona broke ground late last year and is accelerating tool installations to begin active production by mid-2027 to package US-fabricated chips. [1, 2, 3, 4]

3. Equipment Suppliers (The Hidden Enablers)

• ASML Holding (ASML): Historically a lithography leader, ASML is seeing an aggressive revenue surge from selling tools tailored toward advanced packaging and heterogeneous integration.
  • Capacity Increase: Ramping up production across two new US manufacturing locations and breaking ground on a major campus expansion in Eindhoven to push out backend tools faster through 2027. [1, 2, 3]
• ASMPT (ASMPT): A major listed supplier in Singapore specializing in advanced die-bonding systems.
  • Capacity Increase: Booking out its manufacturing pipelines through 2027 as foundries struggle to acquire the high-precision hybrid bonders necessary for modern 3D stacking. [1, 2, 3, 4]

2. ASE Technology Holding Co. (ASX) — The Pullback Leader [1]

• The Rationale: ASE is the definitive giant of the OSAT landscape, executing roughly 45% of total elite backend revenue. Because it is a massive structural asset, it has absorbed incredible capital inflows. However, it recently experienced healthy, brief technical pullbacks, taking the short-term froth out of its price. [1, 2, 3]
• Moving Averages: It dropped below its short-term 20-day exponential structures, turning neutral on basic technical indicators like the Relative Strength Index (RSI). This localized "cooling off" makes it an incredibly attractive buy point for long-term investors entering the cycle. [1, 2]
• The Play: Accumulate shares immediately as it validates technical support. It offers the safest institutional-grade exposure to TSMC's downstream overflow. [1, 2]

2. Amkor Technology, Inc. (AMKR) — The Sovereign Security Premium [1]

• The Rationale: At a trailing P/E of ~51.3x, Amkor is certainly not cheap historically. However, it is fundamentally underweighted when considering its unique geopolitical position as the premier US-onshored advanced packaging facility. [1, 2, 3]
• Moving Averages: Amkor features strong momentum, trading roughly 26% higher than its 50-day SMA and nearly 89% above its 200-day structural baseline. While this signifies a clear extension, the aggressive volume profile suggests institutional accumulation. [1, 2]
• The Play: This is a "growth at a reasonable price" narrative within the AI architecture sphere. Rather than buying a full position all at once, utilize a dollar-cost averaging approach to build exposure over the quarter to protect against near-term macro sector volatility.

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I will track these two (ASX and AMKR) and dollar-cost average into them over the next month or so. I will use top-sliced profits from other shares to provide the cash.

AMAT - Financial Impact of the ASMPT NEXX Buyout

Applied Materials (AMAT) recently purchased $120m of older packaging technology from ASMPT. 

Wall Street has largely looked past any minor near-term drag. Analysts see the integration of NEXX's large-format electrochemical deposition (ECD) tools as a structural growth catalyst. It expands AMAT’s total addressable market within the $3.5 billion advanced packaging equipment sector, positioning the company to capture larger, high-margin package deals for 2027 server designs

My investment in AMAT seems to be paying off (88% gain), hopefully there is still more growth to come...

My thematic investing in 'picks-and-shovels' tech companies has so far paid off, let's hope there is no crash to follow!

Investing in SpaceX via Scottish Mortgage Investment Trust (SMT)

Instead of buying SpaceX, I invested in the Scottish Mortgage Investment Trust fund SMT.

My SMT holding bought mid-April 2026.

SMT had an approx. 20% stake in SpaceX as a private company before the SpaceX IPO.

SMT's Portfolio

Swing trading is easy (in hindsight) but here is how ChatGPT can help!

I opened an ISA on Trading 212 and put £20k in it in April 2025 and started buying stocks. I bought a mixture of individual companies and ETFs. I tried to chase trending stocks. The idea was to use my ISA for more risky stocks which had a higher potential gain (or loss!). In April 2026 I added another £20k and bought more shares.

To date, my T212 ISA has had £40k deposits in 14 months, is at £48.6k right now and an IRR of 42-47% (depending on Hormuz daily variations). 

The question is, could I simply have bought an index fund and done any better for a lot less stress, time and effort?

Trading 212 184k portfolio update

After a disastrous Friday last week, my portfolio has climbed back a bit.

I had some uninvested cash in my T212 accounts, so I took the market dip as a buying opportunity and nearly all £140k of my deposits are now invested.

My all time high was £191k, so my portfolio has not quite fully recovered.

My purchases at the beginning of the week to pick up 'cheap' stocks included:

LLY

META

CME

INTL

MRVL

HPE

AMAT

AVGO

OSCR

SNDK

CSKR

I sold Zevra Therapeutics for a £500 profit (approx 30%) and Elevancc Health for £100 profit.

Portfolio holdings

ISA (£48k - £40k deposited)

OKLO is my biggest loser here. If I sold OKLO now, I would take a £1.1k loss inside my ISA (43%), but unless there is any sudden government investment news, I don't see it improving much. 

Investing in nuclear is a long-term bet and OKLO seems to be just one of many horses in the race but it is backed by Sam Altman (approx $800 million). OKLO is only projected to become profitable in 3 years time. It's share price may go up by 20% this year if I am lucky but most likely it will continue to drift down. OKLO has plenty of cash but is dependent on government energy schemes and a single contract with META. I am going to hold on to OKLO at least until early July for any news of progress (source). Some good news could give a big boost to the share price.

GIA (£136k - £100k deposited)

My losers are mainly gold and silver miners, esp. Lundin Gold and Equinox Gold and OKLO.

I am hoping that the gold miners reports in August will see an increase in their price.

Best performers

Here are some of my best performers in my GIA

I have already top-sliced some of these and my other good performers (MU, SNDK, WDC, AMD, Hynix, etc.).

It may look like I am £36k up in my GIA, but I have crystalised about £10k of gains and HMRC will want their share of these gains next year (minus any tax loss harvesting) - so it is -£2-3k worse than this after deducting taxes!

Note: This is not investment advice and the stocks above have been bought over a period of 1-2 years and may not be such good investments now.

Trading 212 179k portfolio update 2026-06-05

We saw a rapid drop on Friday 5th June 2026 for Tech. stocks including CPU and memory companies. At the end of last week (end May), my portfolio was at £189k so it has lost £10k.

I had set some limit buys and stop losses and most of them triggered. I don't normally do that because it lets the broker (or their agent) see my limits and deliberately stop me out, but this week, because of the insane price rises on some stocks, I wanted to be prepared for a sell-off.

Here are my buys and sells for the first week in June (profit shown for sells in ISA and GIA)...

The rise of AI and what shares to buy next (Dell, HP, Lenovo, etc.)

On the 30th May I tipped various companies including HP, Dell, etc.

I put some limit buys on Trading 212 and managed to pick up HPE for $43. On June 1st it shot up and is now at $59.

Hewlett Packard Enterprise reports record second-quarter results and accelerates its long-term financial goals by two years, underscored by solid demand for artificial intelligence data centers, while Google-owner Alphabet unveils a plan to raise $80 billion in equity capital.

I also had an order for Cisco but it has not yet reached my buy price.

What to buy next?

How to get $Billions for the NHS instead of us paying $Billions!

MPs are currently deciding about a single patient record and are talking about improving GP and Hospital access via combining digital records.

There are concerns over data safety, but what they are not talking about is the value of this data (perhaps deliberately?).

The fact is that the health records of all the population (past and present) of population of 50+ million first-world people is worth an absolute FORTUNE!

UKCGT.xyz capital gains calculator now supports Freetrade .csv files + StockWatcher page

I was sent a sample .csv file for Freetrade and asked to include support for it, so this has now been added this morning into v4.10 onwards.

Please let me know if you find any issue.

StockWatcher

Trading 212 £189k portfolio update 2026-05-29 + tips

 A bumper week, mainly due to positive news on the Hormuz Strait.

My 1 yr IRRs are 47% (GIA) and 43% (ISA)
My all time IRRs (approx 2 yrs) are 95% (GIA) and 55% (ISA)

I decided to spend a little of the spare cash I held in the accounts to top up on the following:

Want cheaper AI - use Deepseek!

After using Codex and ChatGPT 5.5 is was very, very impressed. I subscribed to the Plus model for approx. £17 a month (first month is free).

The rise of AI and how to profit from it!

I have been using ChatGPT 5 with Codex to create html website pages and write scripts for apps - see UKCGT.xyz for an example.

I am truly amazed at the 'intelligence' of the system. There were no hallucinations or serious code mangling or reversals. It just worked beautifully. What I did in a few days would have taken me months in the past.

I can see why there is so much money pouring into AI, but we must remember it is mainly doing what other people have already done before. It uses designs and algorithms that other coders have already developed.

However, I have quickly run into a snag - and that is I am running out of £money!

You see, I bought a Codex Plus subscription for approx. £17/month (first month free), but what they don't tell you is that this limits you to a max. of 5 hour sessions and approx. 40 minutes of ChatGPT 'thinking time'. After that, it wanted me to upgrade to a £100/month subscription or wanted me to wait a week for my next month's subscription to start.

This started me thinking. Many businesses are starting to see the power of AI. Many businesses are reducing their staff and paying AI subscriptions instead. Only 3 junior staff are needed where 10 were needed before, because those 3 can do the work of 10 and are good enough to check the work for bugs, etc.

So I can see the AI revolution timeline like this:

Trading 212 £182k Portfolio update 22/05/2026 + tips

Not much change. The two portfolios went down a lot but then slowly recovered.

I topped-up in the Invest account and made a few new buys...

Trading 212 £182k Portfolio progress update 15/05/2026

It was all going so well until Friday!

At the end of Thursday my T212 portfolios totalled £186k and my Invest account reached 100% IRR - but then came Friday...

I still cannot complain though as my IRR numbers are still is Invest 86% and ISA 42%.

Recent purchases

New share capital gains calculator site ukcgt.xyz is born!

Yesterday, I quickly created a new website at ukcgt.xyz. Since .co.uk and .com were already taken, I went with the .xyz domain as easy2boot.xyz uses it and it was the cheapest!

The new Hostinger site uses the same code as the ukcg page on the easy2boot.xyz site. I will put a link on the easy2boot.xyz page to point users to the new site soon.

Trading 212 and Interactive Investor .csv files have been well tested. I have also tested one Barclays .csv which seems to work OK. The cgtcalculator.com format and a few others are also supported (you can paste the text in or load in from a .txt file). Hargreaves Lansdown csv support has also been added.

The new UKCGT site has a Forum, so please feel free to ask questions or report issues.

If you want support added for a broker format, I must send me an example .csv file of a real UK-based account. You can mangle any ID numbers if you wish and reduce the rows, but any heading lines at the start should not be omitted or changed (I would prefer a freshly downloaded file - preferable one with an example of different types of orders and some stock splits).

Simplest format for data entry

You can type or paste in a simple format such as the one below, with just the number of shares (qty) and price per share in £ if you wish.

B  01/03/2018   SWDA                 1000         3.6093        

B  28/08/2018   SWDA                 1000         4.1565     

S  28/11/2019   SWDA                 2000         4.6702      

B  05/12/2019   SWDA                  500         4.7012         

B  12/02/2020   EQQQ                  150         210.45         

B  18/03/2021   EQQQ                  100          247.8        

S  04/04/2021   EQQQ                  120          305.6         

B  10/06/2021   EQQQ                   50          299.2       

S  15/03/2022   EQQQ                   80          318.4   

Two extra columns for fees and tax will be added as zero when you click Calculate. The Price per share you use should be the Net price - e.g.  (total cost + tax + fees / no. of shares) = net price.

Other calculators

I have given links to some other calculators if you want to compare results.