Broadcom shows sharp price rise today!

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...

More risky share tips!

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:

Cheapest UK S&S ISA provider + my Top Secret Stock Picking Tool!

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:

Is Ashtead Technology a good buy?

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.

HIVE is still looking strong (+ other progress reports)

Hive is still looking good...

I have also taken some small positions on a few other 'chancers' recently too...

I just sold all my Bitcoin (+ are UK CGT rates about to go up?)!

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.

Where to invest - USA, UK FTSE or EU?

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:

Stock tip: HIVE is looking good.

I bought HIVE recently and it is showing encouraging signs.

Maybe one to consider?

--- oOo ---

P.S. 10/10/2025 - over the past few months I traded HIVE about 4 times (max £1000) and made about £600. If I had just held, I would have made more (x2) but I like to take profits when available!

The great Hedging Experiment (To Hedge or Not To Hedge - that is the question)!

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 now released

 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.