Two more investment stocks to consider (BNKE and CKHUY)

BNKE

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!

• April 2025 Buy £1000
• May 2025 Sold £1140
• Aug 2025 Bought £1000

Tip: Uranium and Nuclear Technologies ETF (NUCG) is rocketing!

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!

NUCG

UK Share tip (BOWL)!

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.

Market down today - BUY, BUY, BUY! (Friday Aug 1st 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.

This week's share tips

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!

New free eBook - 'Start Investing Now'!

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.

What shares am I buying next week?

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)?

Inflation and investing - will the banks rip us off even more now?

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!

How to quickly add a menu entry to the agFM startup menu

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 ;-)

Are Fisher Investments worth it (plus Crypto and the Genius Act)?

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.