T212 Portfolio Update £180k - not a good week!

Over the last 4 weeks, I have seen an £8k drop in my ISA account and an £18k drop in my Invest GIA account - ouch!

T212 Net Worth (deposit £155k)

T212 GIA 30/10/2026 (deposit £115k)

T212 ISA 30/10/2026 (deposit £40k)

My ISA has suffered badly as I hold a lot of mining funds and materials companies:

Trading 212 ISA Portfolio - The Funds are nearly all mining ETFs/ETCs.

The only good news was with my relatively small holding in Eli Lilly (which was up 11% this week)...

Recent Buys

I transferred £5k of savings into my T212 account last week and have been trying to buy bargain stocks on their way down.

Here are my recent buys in my GIA account this week. 

IWVG's top holding is in Micron.

Outlook

No tips this week. Many tech companies had good Q3 results but were still hit with a lower stock price.

If you have cash to buy, I would look for low P/E tech companies right now, assuming other indicators are favorable. AI will help companies in sectors involved in finance, software, drug invention, retail/ecommerce, customer support, legal, transportation and logistics, robotics and quality, content creation, etc. - so maybe I should look to buy these companies who are starting to employ AI?

AI

There has been a massive over-reaction in the markets in my opinion and the Tech selloff has been ridiculously overdone. Micron, Seagate and SuperMicro are all very good value now. Intel sales were disappointing because they blamed the high price of memory affecting consumer retail customer sales. So on one hand we have high memory costs and AI consuming memory too much but on the other hand we have memory manufacturers and companies heavily invested in AI with their share prices going down massively! 

Most tech companies have massive order backlogs. Significantly more memory capacity is not expected to come online until 2028. This makes building any new data centers that do not already have pre-agreed component prices very expensive. The same high prices are causing problems for companies which sell PCs/Servers/boxes.

Search engines now employ AI. Usually the free use is limited, but the result is that instead of a user needing to visit 6 sites (each of which carries ads), the user just uses AI to point them at 1 or 2 sites - so far fewer paid ad links are clicked on which reduces Google revenue. AI queries currently carry no or few paid ad links (but Google and others are working on this!). Also, the cost to Google of your free AI search/question sessions is far higher than the old type of Google search query.

So many of these companies have higher capital costs on AI, but this has a knock-on affect of reducing their revenue. Consequently, this is also reducing cash flow and if a company does not have any cash, it has to borrow/raise more or go out of business. Fed interest rates are thought to be going up 0.25% for the next 3 quarters. This will decrease cash flow even more for companies with large borrowings.

Inflation will continue, prices will go up and spending will reduce. However, major cloud service providers have accepted large future contracts for AI and have said that they will spend even more in 2027 on AI. Major companies (e.g. Barclays, Microsoft, Amazon, Kroger, American Express) have already announced future workforce reductions due to AI efficiencies (coding, customer support, finance, robotics, etc.). 

So we have more capex on AI, more debt, unsure profit margins within AI companies and providers - but efficiencies in the companies using and now depending on AI.

Perhaps it is time to reduce my exposure to AI and Tech? On the other hand, perhaps this is a good time to buy them cheaply? My plan is to do nothing. After the midterms and the Fed meeting in December, I should get a better feel for how things are going. I certainly don't want to sell at a loss in a dip.

Gold/Metals

Metals and Miners over last 12 months

Copper/silver/gold miners show a similar picture this year of ups and downs with a bad June/July 2026...

All metals and miners seem to be on a down cycle, but hopefully this will reverse soon, however with the probable future Fed interest rate hikes planned, the outlook is uncertain. I have at least £50k in metals across both portfolios acting as a hedge against my larger All World holdings.

My logic was that AI, infrastructure and BEVs will require more metals and a weak USD should push up gold. Currently the USDvGBP rate is not expected to change much in 2027. However, we may see confidence in cryptocurrency diminish soon. The recent Binance hack shows that your cryptocurrency is not safe and despite blockchains being highly traceable, most of that stolen money does not seem to be recoverable.

Binance have said they will make good any losses, but what if the next attack lasts longer than this 20 minute one?