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)

This is my more shorter term, adventurous account.

It has gained almost 5% in a month and has an IRR of over 6% this week.

The overall IRR is 29% for the 10 months I have so far had it.

My top gainers are shown below:

and my current losers are here:

Gainers of note are Micron MU, Korean ETF CSKR, copper miners COPX and Semiconductor ETF SMGB. 

Losers of note are Centrus Energy LEU and the leveraged x3 ETF for Broadcom AVG3. AVG3 was taken out around 12th December and turned out to be a bad bet. Only yesterday did it start to recover. I was betting that Broadcom was undervalued but made a bad mistake in not setting a stop loss on this holding. I normally set a -10% stop loss on such 'bets' but failed to do it this time. Centrus Energy was bought at it's highest price. These LEU shares were rocketing in my Invest account so I quickly bought £2k in my ISA account, but then the price started to fall...

Centrus Energy LEU bought at the peak!

I am still holding LEU as they are starting to pick up again.

Trading 212 Invest GIA (£110k - started February 2025 DCA)

I recently added £10k to this account but intend to keep most of this £10k as cash, ready to buy shares when there is a market correction.

Over the last month IRR was 3.8% and 3.5% for the last week.

This is showing a gain of £19k on a £100k deposit (not counting the 10k in cash) to date.

The portfolio map is shown below (for yesterday). This is a more long-term portfolio where I try to keep any sells to a minimum to avoid CGT.

Recent buys...

The £50 buys are placeholders. If they still look good to me after a few weeks or months, I will buy more (or may sell). 

Top gainers

These are the top performers...

and the worst losers...

Netflix is by far the biggest loser here, the others are much smaller in value and are just kept as placeholders so I can reinvest in them if they start to pick up again.

Gainers of note this week were Sandisk and Western Digital.

Seagate have also shown a nice gain...

Fresnillo is also still showing good gains after a little hiccup...

Recent buys and top ups...

Note: These are not my only accounts, I have others ISA accounts and a SIPP as well as income from a company pension and a substantial GIA in a Fisher Investment account. So these accounts are basically my 'fun' investment accounts.

Looking back on 2025 with Trading 212

I started with just £1k in a T212 Invest GIA in February 2025 to test out Trading 212. A few months later I added £10k amounts and by May 2025 had deposited 30k. I then crystallised the zero-taxable part of an investment bond I had held which was not performing very well and added this to the T212 GIA account. By Nov 2025 I had deposited £70k. I then closed a GIA account I held with another broker and moved that money into the T212 Invest account. By the end of 2025, total deposits were £100k (with another £10k held as cash).

So you can see that although this account is now at £130k, a large part of this was built up by transferring cash from other accounts and adding savings into it.

The IRR on the Invest account is over 60% which is quite pleasing.

Part of the reason for moving shares over to Trading 212 was because of the user-friendly app and partly due to the reporting features of Trading 212.

The main issue I have with T212 is the 1 year limitation on trading reports/CSVs. In order to work out CGT, it is necessary to download ALL years because you need to have all share purchase orders and all share sell orders. Not being able to just download all transactions is just absolutely STUPID! However, it is better than many other brokers.

As for my T212 ISA account, this was my 'fast buck' account. The intention was to day- and short-term trade using all £20k in this account. I experimented by buying tipped stocks, trending stocks and leveraged stocks in this account. The results were mixed. Some trades I did very well on, while on others I took heavy losses of 20% to 50%. Overall, in 9 months, I made a gain of £5600 on the £20k deposit giving an approx 30% IRR which is not too shabby.

Lessons learned

Short-term trading within the T212 ISA has taught me some valuable lessons (which I reserve the right to ignore in future)...

1. Set a stop loss on risky short term 'bets' - especially leveraged ETFs.
2. When setting a stop loss, if the stock is volatile, only sell a small portion in the stop loss. When it triggers, decide manually whether to sell all of the stock (or buy more). i.e. Use the stop loss as an alert as well as to diminish losses rather than sell the whole position automatically.
3. Small positions are not worth it. I use £50 positions as placeholders which works well, but if buying more than that, the minimum should be £500 otherwise it is not worth it.
4. Don't buy accumulating ETFs inside a GIA. The ERI is a real pain to work out. If you are a basic rate tax payer and don't account for ERI, you will be paying too much CGT when you sell the ETF. I am slowly converting all my accumulating ETFs to distributing ETFs.
5. Trends - there were a number of 'trends' in 2025 for investors. In March 2025 I wrote a blog article on how the Euro stock market was gaining, in particular the banking ETF BNKE. This has gained over 100% in 2025. I bought and sold this several times in 2025 and made a nice profit but I would have doubled my profit if I had just bought and held it. Rolls Royce RR was another similar stock which I traded when I should have just bought and held it (up 120% in 2025).
   After this we had the nuclear SMR trend - I bought into this with mixed results. The biggest mistake here was that I bought at the peak of the market and so paid the highest prices. The lesson I learned was that SMRs and nuclear companies have long time frames. Most of the stock price will already be locked in - the froth is just retail speculation. The shares I have bought will recover in a few years so I am stuck with them for now. In hindsight, maybe I should have just bought Uranium ETFs.
   Next we have gold, silver and copper miners. So far this has turned out to be a good 'bet'. There is a perceived world shortage and a need for these commodities.
   Finally we have AI and data centers - here I went for storage/memory companies like Sandisk, Western Digital, Seagate, Hynix, Micron, etc. as well as chip companies like Samsung and Broadcom (TSMC and ASML gained 50% in 2025 - most of  my picked companies gained much more!). So far I am pleased with this decision. Nvidia 'only' gained 30% in 2025 - I thought that it was very overvalued and so did not buy a lot.

What am I buying in 2026?

For 2026, I am still keen on Data center/AI/storage companies and large, quality Korean companies. Taiwan may not be such a safe place (TSM) and some companies are still very overvalued. 

I am also very keen on buying lots of value ETFs for 2026 (IWVG, IEDL and XSFN).

Korean companies and ETFs are also still appealing to me (Samsung, Hynix, CSKR, IKOR)

Another ETF I like is the Global X Disruptive Materials ETF DMAD (gained 90% in 1 year) and also the emerging markets ETF HDEM (though I have tended in the past to avoid small and emerging markets as it never seemed to work out as well as buying large companies).

I have enough invested in miners and nuclear for 2026 and so don't intend to buy much more (I bought £5k in Fresnillo FRES and I am 50% up already!).

I am keeping an eye on the EU STOXX Finance ETF BNKE too.

Investing in more S&P 500 or USA companies is on hold for me so far in 2026. Trump is totally unpredictable and the GBP/USD Fx rate could favour the £ - or like 2025 - USA stocks could be devalued by 10% due to the weakening USD. 

It's just much 'safer' to buy 'value' ETFs, EU or Korean stocks/ETFs or even the FTSE 100, e.g. PSRU.