Should I Buy Commodities ETFs?

Everyone needs commodities such as coffee, sugar, natural gas, etc. Their value will depend on their availability and future demand.

Wisdom Tree have many ETFs which allow you to 'gamble' on the futures price of some commodities such as Coffee (COFF) which has shown 100% gain in this last year.

Do you want to get free shares worth up to £100?

 Do you want to get free shares worth up to £100 (£8-£100 randomly allocated)?

Join Trading 212, invest with my link and we will both get free shares.

https://www.trading212.com/invite/17tLB1ol6b

Trading 212 will pay 5.1% (UK) interest on cash in your T212 accounts, no monthly charge and no share buy/sell transaction charge (apart from Stamp Duty on UK company shares and Foreign Exchange charge of typ. 0.15% on non-GBP conversions). You can also get a debit card with your account to give you a debit card account paying 5.1% on your T212 balance (check spending/ATM withdrawal limitations).

Stock market tip September 2024 (after Fed reserve rate cut 0.5%)

The USA federal reserve cut the rate by 0.5%. I am taking a cautious approach to large (magnificent 7) US stocks however and especially Tech stocks.

This means I am reducing my USA Tech exposure (XLKQ and IITU). I see finance companies (esp. credit card/lending) doing well in next 6 months and also Energy companies seem quite cheap just now. I am DCAing into world index instead of USA tech.

I have updated my ETF tip blog article with this note:

Update 21/9/2024 - Fed 0.5% rate cut happened which gave approx 1% rise to S&P. Smaller companies should now begin to do better as they will pay less interest on borrowings and can expand. The S&P600/small cap is a good bet now - e.g. ISP6 (2 divs/yr) or USSC (acc - heavier in financials which is good) or invest in both as their top 10 don't overlap. Also Financials (WFEG or XLFQ or UIFS) and Energy (IESU) seem good.

My core ETF XDEQ holding has not performed very well this last 6 months compared to the benchmark SWDA (XDEQ 1yr performance was better than SWDA), however, XDEQ has top holdings in Visa, Mastercard, Nordisk, Costco and ASML, so I expect XDEQ to outperform SWDA in this next 6 months.

N.B. This is not investment advice and I am just a random guy on the internet! Please do your own research before investing.

P.S. On 20 August I tipped gold (SGLN) as perhaps a good hedge, it is currently up 2% (probably more good luck than judgement though!).

P.P.S. I sold SGLN in early October as I don't see it going up much more compared to finance/energy/world quality/small market.

eBook SALE IS NOW ON (15%-25% off this week!)

Store

Even though my eBooks have an average review rating of over 4.5 Stars and only cost $5 (+10% less if you buy more than one), I have now reduced the price by 15% for a week (finish 30 September) so you can get 25% off if you buy two or more!

If you found my eBooks useful, why not get another?

My shop front is here,

P.S. If you like the idea of earning income from a side hustle, why not get my 'How to make $1000 a month from the internet' eBook!  - recently updated to v1.10. If you think you can write and sell eBooks or have a product or business idea, this eBook should save you a lot of time and prevent you from losing money! My own real and truthful sales figures are included + useful hints and tips on how to get started, etc, Surely that is worth a few $ ;=(

Here is an example of how to set up a simple website to sell Digital Products by Hostinger, but read my eBook for hundreds of tips and Gotcha's first!

Add DOS benchmarks to your Easy2Boot USB drive

DOS and DOS-based programs will only work if you legacy/BIOS boot to E2B.

Here are a few tools with instructions.

Phils Computer Lab DOS benchmark tools - download the zip file and extract the contents to a new folder named \DOSBENCH on the large NTFS Partition 1 of your E2B USB drive.  Then legacy boot to the E2B DOS menu and select the  'FreeDIS (from a floppy image)' option. This boots to FreeDOS - select the first 'with NTFS support' option. Now type  CD \DOSBENCH to change to the DOSBENCH folder and type DOSBENCH to run the menu.

The menu also allows you to play DOOM and a Quake demo!

Phils 386 Benchmark Pack

How to prepare your investment portfolio for these volatile times

Stock prices can go up and down a lot within a month. The value of your investment portfolio  will also go up and down too. When it goes up you will feel happy but when it drops by 10% or more, you may begin to question whether now is the time to sell!

SWDA Global Index Tracker ETF (5th August 2024 was a bad day- but the market recovered).

Amazon Prime bargains

This week you can pick up tremendous Amazon bargains!

Air Fryer

I bought an air fryer last year and I can honestly say they are great! Cheap to run, saves using lots of oil (e.g. the expensive Extra Virgin olive oil that I exclusively use), and healthier. I use mine everyday for chips, veg and meat. I now eat fresh meals every day and feel much healthier too. My electricity usage has reduced this year as I hardly ever use my main electric oven now. The air fryer has probably paid for itself already.

The unusual Schallen air fryer (#ad) is not only very cheap (just £30) but it is very easy to clean because the 'basket' is just a large Pyrex glass bowl.

Or you could up-scale to a large 5 litre Cosori (#ad) with Wi-Fi for about £70.

Is it time to buy Gold?

This year, Physical Gold has outperformed many global equity ETFs including my favourites SWDA and XDEQ. The gold ETF SGLN has shown a gain of 27.5% in one year. Over last 1, 3, 5 and 10 years it has kept pace with all world ETFs. Unlike bonds, gold can also dive when the market dives however.

This Q4 is expected to be volatile and the recent correction has scared some people but the market has now recovered. Investors are scared that a bigger correction may be coming before the end of 2024 and 2025 is also looking unsettled. 2025 is predicted to not be as good as the past two years have been. So some people are now turning to gold as a safer haven for their cash.

The graph below compares my favourite Physical Gold ETF (SGLN) to some other popular ETFs. Volatile Tech ETFs like tech ETFs XLKQ (40% gain this last year) or IITU have outperformed gold. China has a lot of secret gold (reputedly far more than they have declared) and if they need/want to sell some, they could devalue the dollar which would affect USA share prices. This would cause gold to increase in price as countries would want to increase their gold holdings to stabilise their own currency. Russia also hold a lot of gold and may need to sell some to support their Ukraine war.

Fix Ventoy UEFI Secure Boot not working on new PCs and Laptops

 

Secure Boot to grub/Ventoy/agFM/Linux, etc.

Secure Boot is supported by many Linux distributions and is an important security feature for ensuring that your boot loader and kernel have not been tampered with. Linux distributions use a Microsoft signed ‘shim’ executable that is then able to verify the subsequent boot stages - that have been signed with the distribution key. The Microsoft-signed shim is signed using the “Microsoft 3rd Party UEFI Certificate”, and this certificate is stored in the BIOS database. 

Starting in 2022 for Secured-core PCs it is a Microsoft requirement for the 3rd Party Certificate to be disabled by default. This means that for any of these platforms shipped with Windows preinstalled an extra step is needed to allow Linux or grub2 or Ventoy or E2B to boot with secure boot enabled. 

To enable secure boot to work with a non-Microsoft bootloader such as used with Linux or grub2 or Ventoy, etc. you will need to enable the “Allow Microsoft 3rd Party UEFI CA” option in the BIOS setup. 

Use the following steps (example Lenovo): 

No more Ventoy Secure Boot Issues - just use an IODD drive!

If you need a Multiboot solution that works with Secure Boot without any problems (no BIOS issues, no MOK Manager changes to the BIOS for Ventoy, etc.), then get an IODD Virtual drive.

The latest one is USB C and is a 2.5" HDD/SSD enclosure. So you can just buy it and fit you own 2.5" SSD which are pretty cheap these days.

These devices allow you to also select fixed size VHDs as a virtual drive (as well as .ISO files and .IMA floppy image files). This means you can have 100's of virtual drives in one device. Each VHD can contain an MBR or GPT drive, each with multiple partitions (e.g. contents of a Rufus USB drive, WinPE, Windows installer, full OS's, Ventoy drive, E2B drive, etc.).

ST400 IODD (#ad link)