Save Tax! Don't use your broker's (e.g. Trading 212) annual report to report your Capital Gains Tax to HMRC!

Trading 212 have one of the best broker  platforms and they produce nice monthly and annual tax year statements. Your 2025 tax year statement should be ready now - but you should NOT actually use the Total gains/loss figure in the annual report of your Invest GIA  in your HMRC self assessment return.

For example, In my Trading 212 - Invest account, I go to Documents - Account Statements - Annual Statements and download the PDF for the 2025 tax year.  This showed me a 'Closed result' for the 2025 tax year of £2,755.

Trading 212 £174k Portfolio progress update 1/05/2026 + tips

Net deposits on Trading 212 are currently: Invest £100k and ISA 40k (only recently added 20k) so I am £34k up at the moment. Here is the result on this morning of Saturday 2 May 2026:

Invest IRR 72%    -          ISA IRR 31%

I still have £4k as cash in the ISA and £10k as cash in the Invest GIA.

I took some profits on some holdings (AMD, ARM) in the last 2 weeks.

Note: If you save £175k into a SIPP and add £200/month every month - you should easily become a millionaire in 20 years (assuming 8%/year gain of shares) - if not a lot sooner!

Current Holdings

Choosing the best Investment Platform for a GIA account (for HMRC tax reporting)

If you have used up your £20k ISA annual allowance, you may want to open a General Investment Account (GIA) and you need to be aware that these are taxable.

Choosing the right GIA platform is important because you cannot easily switch to another platform without triggering a Capital Gain and thus CGT if your gain is over £3k!

Each year you will need to consider the following points:

Trading 212 £175k Portfolio progress update 17/04/2026

This week ended with the announcement that Straights of Hormuz  would be open and so the market ended well up on Friday. However, over the weekend, we saw that the USA were still blockading the Straights and so the Iranians closed access again. It seems the stock market is very dovish at the moment (except for the oil market where oil prices were still very high - they weren't fooled by the tweets from DJT!).

Trading 212 £169k Portfolio progress update 10/04/2026

Last week I did some tax loss harvesting and sold £20ks-worth of shares in my T212 Invest GIA account and then after April 6th, I moved that £20k into the T212 ISA.

This means I now have £40k deposits in my ISA (£17k still as cash) and £100k deposits in my T212 Invest GIA account. Overall, I have slowly built up my T212 accounts to £169k with £140k of deposits over a period from Feb 2024 onwards. Some of that 140k was from my ii Invest account which I transferred across, and some was from an old AXA onshore investment bond that I partly cashed in. The investment bond had been showing a pitiful average growth of approx. 4%/yr annualised (20% tax included) but to cash it all out would have caused a large tax bill.  By investing that money myself, I have changed the IRR from 4% (or 5% if you account for the income tax they deduct) to an IRR of 60%!

If anyone has an onshore Investment bond from Prudential, Standard Life, Phoenix Wealth\AXA, etc. I strongly suggest you check their performance against say a standard UK ETF such as IUKD or a global MSCI ETF such as SWDA. You may be surprised. Most investment bonds hold at least 25% in gilts and the investment funds that they buy often have a very high annual charge (TER) of between 1% and 2% - and that is before their own annual commission charges. These bonds allow you to draw 5% of your initial deposit out tax free over 20 years (generously they don't tax the money that you put in!). Their main use is to pass on your wealth after death or for use in a trust but their performance is often so poor that you or your children would be much better off with a self-managed GIA, even if 45% tax was taken by HMRC. The IHT advantage that these bonds used to have is disappearing in 2027, so there is even less reason to use these unless you put it inside a trust.

The Iran situation seems to be bullish at the moment, so my two T212 accounts are looking much healthier this Saturday morning!

T212 Invest GIA (£100K deposited)

2026/27 UK Tax changes and how to use your UK Tax allowances

The main change for this new tax year (2026/2027) is that the Dividend Tax Rate is increasing by 2%. This means that if you have a Stocks and Shares General Investment account (GIA), then whether you have accumulating or distributing ETFs, you will still need to declare taxable income on ETFs and funds which have a non-zero ERI. The dividend tax is now 10.75% for Basic Rate taxpayers (or 35.75% or 39.35% for higher rate taxpayers).

2025/2026 Tax year Investment Review - how did I do?

After one year of actively investing and trading on Trading 212, I am now (6/4/2026) reviewing my trades and performance. Of course, my results are much worse today due to the Iran crisis and Trump's threat of genocide - last month my GIA IRR was over 50% rather than the 35% now (P.S. on 8/3/2026 my 1yr IRR is 44% just after Trumps 14-day Iran extension was announced)!

£120k Deposit - T212 Invest GIA

My strategy with the Invest GIA account was to invest in long term ETFs and shares and try not to sell them. Nevertheless, it seems I have made 91 SELL trades in the year. Some of the sells were done in order to  switch from Accumulating funds to Distributing funds, and many recent sell trades were done for tax loss harvesting and Bed-and-ISA purposes. A crystalised gain of approx. £1k on T212 was made (after tax loss harvesting) and a total gain (crystalised and uncrystalised) of £21k. My IRR for the year was 35%.

Note that I crystalised 6k of gains when I liquidated my ii invest account, so I needed to get my gains down as much as possible on the T212 invest account to minimise CGT. 

Investing in the new 2026/2027 tax year

The Iran war has now brought us a new perspective for consideration.

From a macroscopic viewpoint, the USA is energy-rich and is not dependent on the middle East for fossil fuels, unlike the rest of the world (Europe and Asia). DJT has managed to make fossil fuels twice as expensive and he will now walk away to leave us with a mess and potentially an expensive war.

Last day for Tax Loss Harvesting!

Thursday April 2nd 2026 is the last trading day of the 2025/2026 tax year in the UK.

This is the day to sell any stocks in your GIA invest account which show a loss.

Your capital gains allowance is £3k, so if you have made more gains in this tax year than £3k, it makes sense to sell those losing stocks now in order to reduce the year's total capital gains to get as near to 3k as possible.

On Tuesday April 7th you can move that cash into your ISA (up to 20k) and buy back the same shares if you wish.

If you need more cash to reach 20k, you can sell more shares to Bed-and-ISA them.

Given the volatile nature of the stock market, you might like to sell shares in your GIA only when Trump has released good news and the market is high (like today) but only buy shares in your ISA on bad news days when prices will be down.

Some people prefer to dollar cost average into their ISA.

P.S. Signup using this link for a free fractional share in Trading 212 worth up to £100 (and I will get a reward too ;-)

What to invest in now (March 2026)?

The world is once again in chaos! The USA and Israel have decided to attack Iran without considering the impact on the rest of the world. Oil/gas prices have doubled.

What this has shown is that the developed world is extremely dependant on oil and gas, especially as it has removed the use of coal in power stations. Renewable energy is not dependable, so oil and gas is still necessary for most countries.

The only other viable solution for 24x7x365 energy is nuclear power. Major countries will now start to escalate their nuclear energy programs (Australia, China, India, EU, UK, etc.). Although this will be a long term swing (5-10 years), I can envisage nuclear energy companies doing well.