Steve's blog about RMPrepUSB, Easy2Boot and USB booting and sometimes other stuff too!
Visit www.rmprepusb.com for over 140 Tutorials on USB booting or www.easy2boot.xyz for a unique USB multiboot solution.
The world needs green electricity - especially electricity that does not depend on the weather (i.e. neither wind nor solar). Unlike the USA, who are drilling for oil and gas with no regard for global warming, the UK have adopted a Net Zero policy.
In November 2024, the UK and 30 other countries signed a global pledge to triple their nuclear capacity by 2050.
Around 17th February 2025, Tech shares began to fall. Some people were afraid that the over-priced tech. bubble was finally popping. Others were reacting to the Trump effect and USA instability.
Some investors feared the worst and sold up and converted their portfolios to cash or bonds - especially those with portfolios in tax free wrappers such as ISAs or SIPPs.
Russia has sent drones over NATO (Poland) territory. This has caused some concern amongst the West.
Oana Lungescu, a fellow at the Royal United Services Institute think tank and a former NATO spokesperson, said NATO Secretary-General Mark Rutte "has said that NATO needs a five-fold increase in air and missile defense capabilities, so that’s an urgent priority. It’s also important that all NATO countries clarify their national legislation about downing aircraft entering their airspace."
Defense stocks and shares had increased in price over the last 8 months due to the Ukraine/Russian war, but this latest incident has shown that more spending on defense (from drones) is immediately required.
Here is a status report of my two Trading 212 accounts which have performed very well this week (it probably won't last :-( ).
My £20K ISA account was opened on April 7 2025 with a £20K lump sum.
My £70K GIA Invest account was opened with £1K in Feb 2024, by June 2025 I had deposited £40K, July 2025 £60K and by Sept. 2025 £70K
Note: I have other SIPP, ISA and GIA accounts which I tend not to touch and only look at occasionally. These comprise of safer, longer term ETFs such as HMWS, XLKQ, IUCM, IITU, EQGB and Artemis Global Income Fund. I use my Trading 212 accounts for more active trading as they have a great app. and web site and very useful search/research features plus alerts, etc. They make investing fun!
I have been investing for over 20 years and have made many mistakes along the way!
My philosophy for these two Trading 212 accounts is to have some fun but never make a large loss by taking big risks. If I buy risky/volatile stocks, it will only be in small amounts that would not seriously harm my whole portfolio. That is why I have 40-50 holdings in each account. Using a wide diversity of stock types is thus spreading the risk. That is why I do not invest large amounts in such trendy, highly tipped companies like FuboTV, HIVE, Crowdstrike, Vertiv, Fortinet, etc. Large losses can seriously affect portfolio performances.
Just use THIS LINK to sign up and get Trading 212 free shares once you have put some money into your account. I will also get some free shares too :-)
I list below some shares and ETFs that have been appearing a lot in many YouTube investor videos.
Most have shown amazing gains so far, but of course they could descend into the depths of Hades at any moment, so beware! Many are purely sentiment driven.
The ones listed below are all ones I hold and most (but not all) are showing me a nice gain so far.
Please do your own research on them and if you decide to buy any, please buy at a good price and remember to take profits before they collapse.
The market at the moment seems to be high, so maybe wait a while?
I will list each one with the 3 month and 1 year performance percentages in parentheses.
Two of my friends here in the UK who were overweight and pre-diabetic have started to take weight loss drugs.
They were not on an NHS prescription however and it had to be paid for out of their own pocket. Each were paying over £200 a month but the results have proved remarkable. Both women have lost weight and look so much healthier, happier and more attractive! Clearly, these drugs advertise themselves!
This, of course, means that the potential for the success of these drugs is enormous, for both women and men.
Clive Thompson is a retired professional investor who has a YouTube channel that gives investing information and tips.
He says he has learnt of large transactions which are about to take place in a week or so by a large ETF company that is disposing of a large amount of stocks and buying other gold and silver stocks instead.
Click to view in YouTube
N.B. Most of these changes will already be priced in by the market!
The sale of large amounts ($100 millions+) of any stock may affect it's price - but not if it is already priced in. The inclusion of new companies into an index ETF will however mean that anyone who buys that ETF will also be buying those new companies too.
He will be telling us the name of some gold and silver mining companies that will be possibly bought and sold by this large ETF company.
However, mining stocks are notoriously volatile and risky. Their share price tends to respond wildly to any news or rumour from any source (social media, news channels, tipsters, etc.).
So I would urge extreme caution if you are thinking of buying any of his miner tips and only bet what you can afford to lose!
The price of the shares that he tips may initially go up, but then quickly drop again as many day traders will take a quick profit. If the price of any of your mining shares rockets due to news or tips, you should think about selling for a profit quickly before everyone else does!
Stablecoins
The US dollar seems to be weakening and gold and silver is strengthening. Many stablecoins like Tether or USD1 are buying gold as a reserve asset which they have to have by US law (see Trumps Big Beautiful Bill) to back these vapourware coins.
What is a Stablecoin?
A stablecoin is a type of digital asset designed to maintain a stable value by pegging its worth to a reserve asset, such as a fiat currency like the U.S. dollar, a commodity like gold, or a basket of assets. This stability addresses the more inherent volatility often found in other cryptocurrencies, making stablecoins especially suitable for everyday transactions and financial services.
Stablecoins play a crucial role in payments, remittances, decentralized finance (DeFi), and cross-border payment solutions. Their stable value ensures that users can transfer funds without the risk of significant value fluctuations during the transaction, which is essential for both consumers and businesses.
America’s new law on stablecoins is so good, “They named it after me,” joked President Donald Trump as he signed the Guiding and Establishing National Innovation for US Stablecoins (GENIUS) Act on July 18th. While the administration and the crypto industry celebrate the dawn of a golden age, the mood across the Atlantic is darker. Stablecoins, tokens backed by conventional assets, are seen as scammy, deeply destabilising - or both. Andrew Bailey, governor of the Bank of England, has warned commercial banks against issuing their own coins. Christine Lagarde, head of the European Central Bank (ecb), cautions that stablecoins could become private money that risks one day dislodging central banks.
Eric Trump and Zach Witkoff, both co-founders of World Liberty Financial along with their fathers, are also taking on roles in a publicly traded Alt5 Sigma, which plans to buy $1.5 billion in WLFI.
Buying their own digital asset through Alt5 Sigma may have secured a $500 million payday, according to the Wall Street Journal.
World Liberty Financial unveiled USD1 stablecoin in March
To be used for $2 bln MGX investment in Binance, WLF co-founder says
Use highlights World Liberty's growing clout in crypto industry
May 1 2025 (Reuters) - A stablecoin launched by Donald Trump's World Liberty Financial crypto venture (USD1) is being used by an Abu Dhabi investment firm for its $2 billion investment in Chinese crypto exchange company Binance, one of World Liberty's co-founders said on Thursday.
Basically, this is like forcing deals to use Mastercard for large payments when you own the company Mastercard! The president of the USA is asking for $billion payments to be made using USD1 when he and his family stand to make $100millions from the transaction charges alone!
Quite how this can be allowed is beyond me. It is no wonder that everyone in the world (except the gullible or greedy Americans) are turning to gold and silver rather than the US dollar when the USA President (Emperor Trump) is forcing through his own legislation and then stuffing as much $cash as he can into his own pockets in plain sight of Congress, the US Supreme Court, Governors and Senators and the American people!
Currency Hedging
The rush to buy gold and silver signals to me that there is a lack of confidence in the USA dollar, so it makes sense to buy currency hedged ETFs when buying USA or World index ETFs. e.g.
EQGB instead of EQQQ - NASDAQ
IGWD instead of SWDA - MSCI Core World
IGUS instead of CSP1 or CSPX - S&P 500
You should also think seriously about holding a large amount of non-US global ETFs (ex-US) to reduce your exposure to the US dollar.
Buying Gold Mines!
Buying shares in gold and silver mines is extremely risky, especially if buying the smaller AIM listed ones.
I have recently bought a few gold and silver shares (against my better judgement) - see below.
I advise you to not copy my trades however, unless you can afford to lose at least 50%!
When the crypto madness ends...
In the GENIUS act, stablecoins have to be backed by fiat such as the US dollar or Gold or Silver.
When the crypto madness ends and people realise that it is just the same as a country-backed fiat currency like the US dollar and just as stable or unstable (and transaction charges are higher than inter-bank charges), then as stablecoins are sold off by their holders, the stablecoin companies will no longer need to hold gold or silver to back their stablecoins so they will start selling off these assets.
This will cause a collapse of the gold and silver price and these miners will suffer a market crash.
This could set the economic world into a panic as the US dollar will weaken as will US bonds, gold and silver. There will be runs on stablecoins as the value of their gold/silver assets will not be sufficient and people fear they will go bust and leave them holding worthless stablecoins.
This could cause some financial institutions (incl. crypto) to collapse as there will be a run on crypto and the banks.
Just at the moment however, it seems to me that people have a lot of cash to invest (as no one wants to start or invest in a new business with such economic uncertainty around) and they see large US tech. companies as the best place to put their cash while interest rates are low. This is the start of a bubble (Broadcom AVGO has a P/E of nearly x100, Palantir over x500).
I am watching for signs of collapse very carefully.
Anyone in the UK who has not already opened a Stocks and Shares ISA must be crazy! Lol :-)
Trading 212 offer a free account (no charges except a very small Foreign Exchange rate charge if you buy non-GBP shares). You can buy fractional shares (so you can buy shares even if you only have £5 a month to invest) and because the ISA is flexible, you can take out all your money from the ISA (tax free) at any time and as long as you put it back in before the end of the tax year (April 5th 2026), anything you put back in is still tax free. You don't need to tell the tax man about your ISA or any profit you make inside your ISA - it is all tax free!
Manolete Partners are an insolvency litigation financing company who were listed on the AIM market in 2008 and has risen 38% in the last month and 16% in the last week. Manolete work for, and alongside, HMRC, the Insolvency Service, the British Business Bank and the many hundreds of outstanding private sector insolvency practitioners and insolvency and restructuring lawyers.
The recent share price increase is presumably due to recent cases which they have on-boarded and funded. Their 2024 net profit was 3%.
I have been investing in Stocks and Shares for over 20 years, starting with ISAs and then with General (taxable) Investment Accounts (GIAs) and then I also started a SIPP.
Over those 20 years, I have made all the mistakes possible:
Broadcom (AVGO) often appears in the top 10 tech stocks lists but yet seems to be mainly ignored by most retail investors. It has shown a massive gain of over 100% in just 1 year.
This morning (pre-market UK) it seems to be rocketing up 10% so far today, so I have bought in...
Last week I bought a few 'risky' shares/ETFs inside my ISA. Yesterday the whole market was down, but when the UK market opened this morning, it was looking better.
First, I have bought £1000 of the NASDAQ 100 x3 long QQQ3 this morning as I notice that EQGB, XLKQ and IITU are all up this morning (probably due to Alphabet/Google).
Then I checked on my recent smaller mining holdings which are also up today:
In the UK, the cheapest Stocks and Shares providers are Trading 212 and Invest Engine, however they do not provide all types of accounts (e.g. SIPPs, LISAs) and do not allow purchase of mutual funds (e.g. my current favourite fund - Artemis Global Income Fund).
Some brokerage providers do not offer Flexible ISAs and have quite high trading charges.
A new online tool (under development) is here. It is not yet entirely accurate, but you can view the source data here and check each brokers T&Cs. For instance I have an Interactive Investor account and the charges are shown incorrectly by this online tool, they are actually:
One of the YouTube channels I follow is that of the Geordie Pig Investor. He used to be very strongly into UK Dividend paying companies, but has since seen the light and has started to strengthen his portfolio with USA and global accumulating ETFs.
In normal times, I would buy mainly World ETFs and US Tech ETFs, but I think the USA is heading for a money-printing phase next year and weakening dollar. The Trump effect has made me cautious.
So I have been looking for a good UK company like RR to invest in and Geordie Pig's pick of Ashtead Technology seems like a bargain to me, especially as it has just gone ex-dividend this month and so its low price should rise again before the next 6-monthly dividend payout in early Jan 2026. His video is below. The shares should be moving out of the AIM market on October 6th and although this will be priced in, it may see greater upwards movement when it hits the London market.
I have held a small amount of crypto via Coinbase for many years.
I originally started a Coinbase account because some of my users wanted to make a donation in crypto in gratitude for my free RMPrepUSB and Easy2Boot software.
Donations were usually quite small, but over a period of a few years, it probably added up to about £100. I experimented with this as it grew in value and bought £600 Ethereum with it as it grew in value. A few years ago, I then converted it all back into Bitcoin and this week I decided to cash it all in for about £1200. I am just not convinced Bitcoin or crypto is going anywhere - after all it has had plenty of opportunity. Stablecoins are another offshoot, but the infrastructure costs of maintaining a global blockchain and transaction costs don't seem to live up to the promises. If they did, then the finance companies would be adopting crypto like crazy.
Cashing in my Bitcoin means I have crystallised a taxable capital gain of approx. £600. The Coinbase fee for the conversion to cash and withdrawal was over £20. So much for crypto transactions being cheap (1.66%)!
What to buy with £1200?
This leaves me with the problem of what to buy with the 'free' money.
The USA market is looking very volatile at the moment. It is not clear whether USA $ index ETFs are a good investment right now, compared to the UK or Europe (or even other areas such as Japan, etc.).
US stocks have fallen for five days running as traders nervously await a speech from Federal Reserve chairman Jerome Powell.
I use my GIA accounts for safer, less volatile, longer term investing. In these GIA accounts I hold HMWS, EQGB, XLKQ and IUCM (the first MSCI all world containing approx. 60% US companies and the last three almost 100% US companies). So long-term, I am very Tech biased and thus USA biased.
However, in my £20K ISA account on Trading 212, I have a lot of fingers in a lot of pies as I like to short-term and mid-term trade within this account because any gains within my ISA will not trigger any CGT when sold.
This morning's T212 ISA mix is quite a mess at the moment (IRR 13%) as I am top-slicing many of the larger holdings in order to hold cash, ready to buy on the forthcoming dip.
The promise of AI seems to have been oversold as far as I can see. The chip producers and AI software companies seem to have over promised. AI will benefit certain service sectors and finance sectors however, especially anyone who uses a large number of real live humans for support services, etc.
Another complication is the weak $Dollar rate vs the UK £GBP or EU €Euro. I am avoiding any risk by opting for currency hedged ETFs (e.g. EQGB instead of EQQQ).
The 3-month chart below shows how the $Dollar rate has affected gains on index funds for UK investors:
You will see many YouTube videos which continually tell you how important it is to buy the index ETF which has the lowest TER rate.
The TER is the hidden rate that you are charged. It is the cost of owning the ETF. Differences between different providers are usually very small. For instance the benchmark World ETF SWDA has a TER of 0.20% but the identical ETF HMWS has a TER of 0.15%.
Over 3 years, the gain of these two ETFs were:
SWDA 37.28% (TER 0.20%)
HMWS 37.83% (TER 0.15%)
So £10,000 invested for 3 years would give us approx. £78 more if we chose HMWS instead of SWDA.
However, we often have another choice to make when deciding which index ETF to buy and that is whether to buy a currency hedged or unhedged ETF.
Ventoy 1.1.07 is now available from the Ventoy website. Download here.
If you have added the Ventoy image files to your E2B drive, you can update them by clicking on the Make_Latest_Ventoy_Partition_Image.cmd script which is located on the 2nd partition of the E2B drive in the \e2b\Update agFM folder.
Note that the integrated and modified Ventoy For Easy2Boot is still version 1.0.97 of Ventoy.
Back in April 2023, I decided to add an actively managed fund to my portfolio. I chose the Royal London Global Equity Select Fund (Acc) and for 2023 and early 2024 it proved to be a good choice.
However, the fund manager and it's Alpha managers left Royal London in April 2024 and since then the performance of this fund has been disappointing to say the least (4% vs. 11% for a benchmark global equity fund)...
You may find that some WinPE ISOs boot to the WinPE Desktop OK, but some Desktop icons may be missing or not functional or some shortcuts report a 'Drive Y: not found' error message.
The problem is that many WinPE ISOs are actually designed to be extracted onto a USB drive and not actually booted from an ISO file. In some cases the WinPE startup files may look for the ISO on a drive (so it can mount it as drive Y:) but may not find it.
For instance the Ankh Tech WinPE ISOs an Easy2Boot USB drive may work OK if you legacy boot (and add a _.isope01 suffix to the filename) in legacy BIOS boot mode from the E2B menu system or if using the Ventoy menu, but if Legacy or UEFI booting to the agFM menu, the WinPE ISO may boot OK, but some Desktop and Start Menu items in WinPE may not run.
Generally, there is not much difference between hedged and unhedged ETFs for UK investors over the long term, however due to the weakening dollar to GBP rate, instead of buying the Nasdaq 100 ETF EQQQ, I have been buying the hedged ETF version EQGB (which has a higher TER of 0.35% compared to 0.30%) because the performance difference has been quite marked.
In the above chart, we see the hedged EQGB has massively outperformed the unhedged EQQQ so far this year. Almost a 9% difference in the last 6 months is quite a difference!
However, if we look at the performance over just the last month, I can see that the unhedged ETF EQQQ has shown a return of 4.86% vs. 4.04% of EQGB.
ChatGPT can be sent files and asked to comment on them, so I uploaded my Trading 212 Account Statement for July 2025 and asked it to identify the stinkers!
I bought Amundi Euro Stoxx Banks ETF (BNKE) in April 2025 and sold a month later for a 14% profit when it plateaued for a while. Since then, I have been tempted to buy back in but only this week have I taken the plunge. It has gained 22% in the last 3 months, so perhaps I should not have sold so early after all!
The NUCG ETF seems to be performing well. Almost 100% gain in one year (45% YTD).
I bought £2k-worth on T212 16th June 2025 and I am so far up about 12%.
See below for 2nd hot tip (500% gain in 1 year)
I bought this to hold long-term and so I was rather pleased that it is rising so quickly. I am not sure if it represents a good buy today, but it has gained 17% in the last month and is not plateauing yet AFAICT.
Holdings are spread between mainly Canada, USA and Japan 1/3 each so it does give some Fx rate diversity too.
One holding is the NuScale Power SMR producer (SMR) which has gained 158% in 3 months and another is Cameco Corp (CCJ) a Uranium producer which has gained almost 60% in the last 3 months.
Please do your own research before investing - this is not investment advice!
It is looking like the market (esp. USA) is recovering slightly since the small dip last Friday. I will be watching Palantir and AMD closely today for their Q2 results. Intel is also looking good value at the moment.
UK tip
The indoor bowling company Hollywood Bowl (BOWL) may be worth buying and holding until at least the end of this year.
They have recently spent a lot of their cash on updating and refurbing their bowling alleys and have concentrated on enhancing the more profit-generating parts of their business. They are also in the process of a £5 million share buy back by Sept. 2025.
It seems the tariffs on China and Canada imports that we all knew were coming has caused a dip in the market. Amazon has dropped 8% due to profit worries even though results were good. Volume in trading is low today, so the drop is probably due to small retail investment sentiment rather than large volume traders and so it should bounce up again next Monday.
So today may be a good time to buy more of your favourite stock. We all know that we will get a compromise in the end and that China, Mexico and Canada will work around the tariffs. Taiwan are also going to be subject to 20% tariffs on Aug 7th. Unfortunately, in the end it will be the USA and the USA tax payer that will suffer.
Vertiv, which I already hold, has shown a promising 16% gain in the last week.
FuboTV (FUBO) is at last looking better with a 12% gain in the last week (24% in last 3 months).
Robinhood (HOOD) is looking strong but needs to be watched closely today as Q2 results are due at the end of today! 400% gain in a year with reasonably steady chart line.
Fortinet (FTNT) has been stable for 3 months but may jump up depending on Q2 results next Wednesday 6th Aug.
HIMS is rising rapidly as good expected Q2 results on 4th August are anticipated.
IUCM S&P 500 Communications has Meta, Netflix, Alphabet, Disney and telco companies as major holdings is one of my favourite ETFs (I pair with XLKQ) and has not performed as well in the last 6 months as it had the previous 6 months. I have topped up on this $ ETF in the hope of good Q2 results.
AMZN dived in the first 3 months of 2025 due to heavy capital investment and the weakened $, but it now looks to be making a strong recovery.
Classic high flyers PLTR, AMD, NVDA, MSFT, GOOG are being tipped this week, but I prefer to buy via index ETFs such as Nasdaq EQGB or EQQQ and S&P 500 Tech ETFs, etc.
XLKQ/IITU USA Tech and Nasdaq have performed well in last 3 months.
Note: This is not investment advice - i'm just an average bod on the internet!
I have just written a new FREE eBook (using Apples free iPages online editor on iCloud) and it is now available from my Payhip store as a free PDF file.
The eBook is targeted at potential UK newbie investors who have thought about starting a Stocks and Shares investment ISA or perhaps a SIPP personal pension fund but have given up because they thought it was way too complicated.
In fact, investing is ridiculously easy these days and online brokers such as Trading 212 make it really easy to start.
First, I will share that I have crystallised profit and sold a major portion of SOFI. I have been buying more SOFI over the last few weeks, so I sold £5000 for a profit of £421 made in just 3 weeks. Due to the short timescale the Fx hit was only £7. I still have some SOFI shares that I bought for £1000 and they are currently valued at £1516, so that is a 50% unrealised gain so far.
The good news is that the S&P 100 is up 5% this week. I would think it is a good time to buy it or the NASDAQ 100 or US Tech (XLKQ or IITU or IUCM) while the £ has strong buying power.
What have I bought this month (July 3rd - 18th 2025)?
Many people in the UK think that investing is 'risky'. This is true if you invest in a few individual companies, but a global index tracker fund is not risky in the long term - it is just more volatile than a savings account (but far more rewarding!).
Even Government bonds are no longer perceived as entirely risk-free assets - their long-term growth potential is now in doubt if you consider inflation too.
In this article, I also discuss a UK index ETF that has returned an average of 17% each year over the last 5 years, gives over 4% in dividends each year and did NOT lose you money in 2022!
If you boot to an E2B USB drive in UEFI mode, the agFM UEFI menu system will be loaded...
Although you can browse the folder structure of Partition 1 using this menu system, the first startup menu screen contains some hard coded entries too.
You can add more menu entries to the top of this menu by creating a new text file into the FAT32 Partition 2 folder \boot\grubfm\user_menu_top.cfg
The example below adds the existing imgptn23 Memtest86 partition image file to the top of the startup menu.
Partition 2 folder \boot\grubfm\user_menu_top.cfg
You can test for $EFI32 or $MBR instead of $EFI64 and use a .ISO file or .EFI file instead of a .imgptn23 file. You can remove the if xxx lines (and fi lines) if you don't want to test the boot mode or test for the existence of the target file.
--class=uefi determines the icon that is displayed on the left of the menu entry. Here is a selection (some may not be available if you use the default agFM theme)...
See the agFM page or better still get my eBooks for more details ;-)
Fisher Investments are a well-known, high profile independent investment advisory firm founded by Ken Fisher in 1979. They manage assets for both individual and institutional clients, offering personalized investment strategies and financial planning resources. Fisher Investments charges a fee based on a percentage of assets under management, with rates varying based on the portfolio size and account type. Typical charges are 1.5% plus an initial on-boarding fee. Overall, including fees, Fisher aim to beat the performance of the global MSCI index (e.g. SWDA).
The Purisima Global Total Return B fund is managed by Fisher and has a TER of 1.51% and we can use it to compare Fisher's investment performance with other benchmark indexes.
There are early Amazon Prime deals available now before Amazon Prime day which officially start midnight Tuesday 8 July! For instance, The 10" Fire Tablet (#Ad) is less than £90 with screen protector.
You can get the 64GB model (#Ad) for just £103 saving almost £100!
I recently purchased some clip-on, polarised sunglasses (#Ad) for my prescription glasses. At the moment two pairs are less than £6 and they are both of very high quality.
It looked like it was trending upwards, so I bought 356 shares on July 1st and today it is up 12%.
This is a risky 'bet' but I am holding for a while. It may be undervalued and could reach $4.
I am not an expert in this industry, so please do your own research before investing and if you cannot afford to lose 90% of your deposit then please avoid this stock!
I am also keeping an eye on UK drinks firm Diageo (DGE). This has dropped 24% in a year but has good cash flow and net profit margin of nearly 20%. It too may be undervalued and it looks like it is bouncing up (a hot summer could not hurt it either!). It pays approx. 3% dividend.
P.S. I bought £500 of Rightmove in May 2025, picked up a £4 dividend May 23rd, and sold today for £552 to lock in profit. See here for tip mention.
In my General Investment Accounts (GIAs), I try to hold just a small number of ETFs for several years without selling. This is mainly because it is a real pain to have to work out Capital Gains Tax (CGT) if I have a 100+ sell transactions in a tax year. I also do the same with my SIPP.
I use my ISA accounts for short term trading. Some people set up watchlists, but because I use Trading 212, I like to actually buy a small amount of any share that is on my current hot list as there are no trading fees on T212.
Because I max out my ISA allowance every year, I cannot add more into my ISAs, so this means I cannot 'gamble' more than is in the ISA accounts (and I also keep at least half of my ISAs in more 'sensible' long-term ETFs like all-world ETFs or S&P 500 or NASDAQ, IITU, IUCM, etc.).
If I see the price of any share in my portfolio trending downwards, instead of selling 100% of the share, I will sell just a portion of it. For instance, if I have £1000 in Palantir and the price starts to dive, I will sell between 50% and 95% depending on how I feel about it's chances of recovery. If I think the shares were a 'one hit wonder' or that they are going to go to zero - only then do I sell 100% of them.
This allows me to keep an eye on all my 'potential' good prospect shares because they are still in my portfolio (albeit some at a low value of just £10 or so).
If any of them are low value, I look to see if now is a good time to buy more, or just wait. I try to keep some cash in my ISA for this purpose.
Since April 2025, my 20k deposit into my T212 ISA is currently worth 21.86k with an IRR of 10% which isn't too shabby for 3 months considering it was not fully invested until mid-May!
The shares that are on my current 'to buy' watchlist are (next week's possible buys are in bold):
If you have a working USB flash drive that contains WinPE, such as that made by the Lenovo USB Recovery Key app., you may need to follow this procedure if you want to add an image of that drive to your E2B USB drive.
See also the .imgptnREP3 section at the bottom of this article if you want to have multiple images on one E2B USB drive without temporarily replacing the first partition of your E2B drive.
If you are looking for a USA ETF that consistently beats the S&P 500, All-World ETFs and even the NASDAQ 100 and don't live in the USA then try a hedged NASDAQ ETF such as EQGB.
The chart below shows you the YearToDate (YTD) performance.
The performance of global ETFs (e.g. SWDA) and S&P 500 ETFs (e.g. CSP1) so far this year has been disappointing to say the least!
It seems that bonds are not as safe as we thought either. However, it does appear that rare and precious metals are doing quite well. Two ETFs that have caught me attention are:
GJGB - VanEck Junior Gold Miners UCITS
NUCG - VanEck Uranium and Nuclear Technologies UCITS ETF A
Both of these have shown 17% and 26% gains in just the last month:
We are now 6 months into 2025 and it is looking like Trump's devastating tariffs and his 'Big Beautiful Bill' is not going to be allowed to go ahead in it's entirety.
It may be that now is a good time to invest some spare cash that I may hold because it is looking like 'play time' will soon be over and the grown-ups will start to take charge of the USA soon.
In the last month, the Bitcoin-oriented share ALTBG (Euro) has gained over 200% to date (11:00 BST 21-May-2025). They went up 168% in the last week!
This company has pledged to buy a large amount of BitCoin and seems to be rocketing. It often has a trading halt on it for a few hours but it is currently trading.
I received this email yesterday from M&S about the 'cyber incident' they suffered recently (although it seems they knew since Feb.2025!).
It says that criminals have obtained my 'contact details, date of birth and online order history' and goes on to assure me that no usable card or payment details or passwords were obtained.
E2B, agFM and Ventoy allow you to use an unattend XML file with your Microsoft Window 10/11 ISO. This allows you to specify settings and components for your Windows install as well as semi- or fully-automate the install.
Previously, I have recommended the online Windows Answer File Generator (WAFG) but the site seems to no longer exist...
Here is how to get the KRD2025 ISO to legacy boot on E2B with user file persistence and with update file persistence.
1. Download the krd.iso file and save it to \_ISO\LINUX folder as KRD2025.iso.
2. Download the Ventoy pre-made 'backend' persistence files contained within the images.zip and extract ONE of the following persistence files as a .dat file using 7zip. I tried the 2gb one.
It is possible to buy an ETN such as £3STP or €3STE which shorts TESLA shares.
The GraniteShares 3x Short Tesla Daily ETP seeks to track the Solactive Daily Leveraged 3x Short Tesla (-3x) index. The Solactive Daily Leveraged 3x Short Tesla (-3x) index tracks the three times leveraged inverse performance of the Tesla share on a daily basis.
The ETN's TER (total expense ratio) amounts to 0.99% p.a.. The ETN replicates the performance of the underlying index synthetically with a swap. The dividends in the ETN are accumulated and reinvested in the ETF.
The GraniteShares 3x Short Tesla Daily ETP is a small ETN with 18m GBP assets under management. The ETN was launched on 29 June 2020 and is domiciled in Ireland.
GraniteShares 3x short TESLA (Ticker 3STE) is an ETN that shorts TESLA by a negative factor of x3.
As long as I have some spare cash, then using a 'short' or 'inverse' fund allows me to hedge my portfolio but without selling any shares in my portfolio.
If you use Trading 212, use the Search page and look for 'Inverse ETFs' in the sidebar under the 'ETFs' heading.
Investors have secretly been moving away from S&P 500 stocks to Euro stocks. The past, excellent performance of the S&P 500 was mainly dependent on Tech stocks and due to recent events in AI and Elon Musk and his buddy DJT, etc. investors now think that Euro stocks have been undervalued in recent years.
The S&P 500 has historically shown very good and consistent gains, however the USA is proving to be quite a volatile market this year (2025) and so a more widely diversified portfolio would seem a sensible option.
However, investing in the whole global core market - e.g. Core MSCI World (ETF SWDA with 1,300 holdings) gives us diluted performance as it contains over 1000 stocks.
Now in my current portfolio, I have cherry-picked some S&P 500 stocks by using sector S&P 500 ETFs which have shown good performance and which I believe may continue to show good performance, such as:
Tech - e.g. IITU or XLKQ
Communications - e.g. IUCM
Commodities - e.g. COMM
Finance - e.g. IUFS
Consumer - e.g. IUCD
Utilities - e.g. IUSU
But what if I build a portfolio based on these sectors but using specially selected global market shares instead?
Very little has changed. The main thing was to test for the presence of wmic.exe in your Windows filesystem because new installations of Windows 11 will no longer have this once standard but now deprecated Windows utility.
Wmic.exe can be added into Windows 11 using the Optional Features option...
A new Windows 11 installation may not include the WMIC utility by default. See here
Add WMIC using: Windows 11 – Settings (Winkey+I) – Apps – Optional Features – View Features – WMIC – Install A Windows restart/reboot my be required after installing WMIC.
I do use a small part of my investment portfolio to buy individual company stocks like NVidia or Amazon or Tower Resources (big fail!), but as I am no expert in company analysis, I tend to only break even with these at the best of times! The problem is always when one stock dives significantly - I have learnt that slow and steady is better than risking any significant loss in just one stock as it takes ages to recover from that loss.
Index ETFs on the other hand will never go down to zero and usually tend to go up or at least keep pace with inflation.
The only exception is if I (stupidly) buy a very risky stock. In this case, I will buy it inside my GIA account so that if I make a loss, I can deduct that loss from my total gains and thus pay less CGT. If it makes a large gain, then I don't mind paying the CGT! On the other hand, if I held it inside my ISA and I lost 90% of it, I cannot even make use of that loss and it will take months to get that money back from my other investments. Trading outside of an ISA does sometimes have an advantage in that you can deduct that loss from your gains.
The ETFs I have listed below are my current favourites.
My ratio of holdings in these however will vary depending on the current stock market climate.
My favourite ETFs, ordered by fund size.
I tend to not sell ETFs such as SWDA, XDEQ, XLKQ, HMWS, CSP1 and EQQQ, and so I hold these in my SIPP and GIA accounts and don't sell them so as not to incur capital gains tax.
The recent news that the latest open source release on GitHub of Chinese-based DeepSeek (equiv. to ChatGPT, OpenAI, etc.) is supposedly 95% cheaper than current US solutions using high-end nVidia chips.
Others are saying it gives a x30 performance improvement, taking much less time to teach it and less power to run it.
The stock market (S&P, Tech) is panicking as there certainly does seem to be some truth to the claims.
I have a General Investment account with Interactive Investor, but I found it very painful to calculate my UK Capital Gains Tax liability on my Stocks and Shares sales.
Then someone on the ii forum suggested I try www.cgtcalculator.com and it seems to be pretty good. It seems to understand the same day rule, Section 104 rule and the 30-day rule.
If you don't know what the 30-day rule (bed-and-breakfast rule) is, then watch this video (see example 1) and here. Note selling shares of ABC on Trading 212 for instance, but then buying ABC a few days later on Interactive Investor also counts in the 30-day rule (AFAIK)!
If you have several GIA accounts, you should combine all trades into one table (CSV, XLSX, etc.) first, before calculating gains/losses and CGT.
So here are my simple steps to calculate gains/losses for CGT purposes. I also include a Trading 212 example.
I am often asked by family and friends what they should invest in. This is an extremely difficult question because I don't want to be disowned by them if they lose their money!
Stock and Shares investment is a long term commitment.
They can go up-diddly-up-up or down-diddly-down-down!
Be prepared - in some years your investment pot may decrease a lot in value but don't sell!
If you can't stand to see your portfolio lose 20% in a year, then you could choose a nice safe savings account instead! However, savings accounts barely keep up with inflation. If you are a high rate tax payer and put £100K into a savings account paying 5%, then in the UK each year you will pay 40% of that 5K interest to the tax man! If cashing out after 5 years, due to loss of compounding and the tax difference, you will be about £5K better off with a 5% gain ETF even if in a taxable S&S account, than in a 5% savings account.
When investing in Stocks and Shares we must consider:
Is an income required (Accumulating or Dividend portfolio)?
Tax laws in your country of residence and using them to your best advantage
Attitude to risk and loss (would you mind if your portfolio went down 40% in a year?)
Do you need access to the money within a few years - e.g. to buy a house or car?
If you use Trading 212 to invest in Stocks and Shares or a Cash ISA, you may have noticed that the main screen can be very misleading and it is impossible to know if we have performed well or badly compared to other investors.
Here is an old screenshot which used to just show the total cost price of all the current shares in the portfolio and the gain on those current shares (e.g. current gain on £100k+ account is only £182). However, we do not know how much was deposited into the account in total or what the true return is. This account could have had total deposits of £100,000 for instance, and made various buys and sells over time. £8918 made over a period of 3 months is impressive, but over 5 years it is not so great! The gain of 0.17% does not sound impressive, but if the account had £100k made in deposits, it has actually made £8918 and if that was over a period of exactly one year, that is a 9% true gain (not 0.17%)!
ETFs like VOO (Vanguard S&P 500 ETF) and SCHD (Schwab U.S. Dividend Equity ETF) are not available on UK broker platforms such as Trading 212, Interactive Investor, etc.
You may have seen YouTube videos which recommend these ETFs.
Here are some equivalents which are usually available to UK and non-USA citizens.
If you need to construct a grub2 menu, but then find that it does not work, you can add in some extra debug lines. For instance the grub2 read command will wait for you to press the RETURN key before continuing execution and an echo command can be used to track progress and view grub2 variable values.
Here is an example grub2 menu display output screen...
and here is the grub2 menu that was used...
menuentry "Arch Linux with Parameters" {
set iso_path="/_ISO/LINUX/archlinux-2024.12.01-x86_64.iso"