Hot Tip - Hive Digital Technologies up 12% in a day

HIVE is a crypto company into mining, etc.

It looked like it was trending upwards, so I bought 356 shares on July 1st and today it is up 12%.

This is a risky 'bet' but I am holding for a while. It may be undervalued and could reach $4.

I am not an expert in this industry, so please do your own research before investing and if you cannot afford to lose 90% of your deposit then please avoid this stock!

I am also keeping an eye on UK drinks firm Diageo (DGE). This has dropped 24% in a year but has good cash flow and net profit margin of nearly 20%. It too may be undervalued and it looks like it is bouncing up (a hot summer could not hurt it either!). It pays approx. 3% dividend.

P.S. I bought £500 of Rightmove in May 2025, picked up a £4 dividend May 23rd, and sold today for £552 to lock in profit. See here for tip mention.

Try CachyOS for a fast Linux-based Live CD ISO (includes RAM/CPU test programs)

For a fast and responsive Live CD or installation try Arch Linux-based CachyOS. I tried the Desktop version of the Install/LiveCD ISO.

The ISO's grub2 menu also has a MemTest86+ v7.2 option...

Once booted to the Live CD, you can install various versions onto your internal hard disk or just run the Live CD Desktop OS. OCCT is included...

These Stocks and Shares are now on my 'to buy' watch list

In my General Investment Accounts (GIAs), I try to hold just a small number of ETFs for several years without selling. This is mainly because it is a real pain to have to work out Capital Gains Tax (CGT) if I have a  100+ sell transactions in a tax year. I also do the same with my SIPP.

I use my ISA accounts for short term trading. Some people set up watchlists, but because I use Trading 212, I like to actually buy a small amount of any share that is on my current hot list as there are no trading fees on T212.

Because I max out my ISA allowance every year, I cannot add more into my ISAs, so this means I cannot 'gamble' more than is in the ISA accounts (and I also keep at least half of my ISAs in more 'sensible' long-term ETFs like all-world ETFs or S&P 500 or NASDAQ, IITU, IUCM, etc.).

If I see the price of any share in my portfolio trending downwards, instead of selling 100% of the share, I will sell just a portion of it. For instance, if I have £1000 in Palantir and the price starts to dive, I will sell between 50% and 95% depending on how I feel about it's chances of recovery. If I think the shares were a 'one hit wonder' or that they are going to go to zero - only then do I sell 100% of them.

This allows me to keep an eye on all my 'potential' good prospect shares because they are still in my portfolio (albeit some at a low value of just £10 or so).

If any of them are low value, I look to see if now is a good time to buy more, or just wait. I try to keep some cash in my ISA for this purpose. 

Since April 2025, my 20k deposit into my T212 ISA is currently worth 21.86k with an IRR of 10% which isn't too shabby for 3 months considering it was not fully invested until mid-May!

The shares that are on my current 'to buy' watchlist are (next week's possible buys are in bold):

How to add a WinPE USB Recovery drive to E2B or Ventoy (e.g. Lenovo Recovery USB)

If you have a working USB flash drive that contains WinPE, such as that made by the Lenovo USB Recovery Key app., you may need to follow this procedure if you want to add an image of that drive to your E2B USB drive.

See also the .imgptnREP3 section at the bottom of this article if you want to have multiple images on one E2B USB drive without temporarily replacing the first partition of your E2B drive.

This ETF beats the S&P 500, NASDAQ and All-World ETFs over 1mnth, 6mnth, YTD, 1, 3 and 5yrs!

If you are looking for a USA ETF that consistently beats the S&P 500, All-World ETFs and even the NASDAQ 100 and don't live in the USA then try a hedged NASDAQ ETF such as EQGB.

The chart below shows you the YearToDate (YTD) performance.

What speculative ETFs am I buying in June 2025?

The performance of global ETFs (e.g. SWDA) and S&P 500 ETFs (e.g. CSP1) so far this year has been disappointing to say the least!

It seems that bonds are not as safe as we thought either. However, it does appear that rare and precious metals are doing quite well. Two ETFs that have caught me attention are:

• GJGB - VanEck Junior Gold Miners UCITS
• NUCG - VanEck Uranium and Nuclear Technologies UCITS ETF A

Both of these have shown 17% and 26% gains in just the last month:

How to back test your portfolio for free

I have wanted to back test the performance of various portfolios for a while now.

One of the best sites I have found is https://www.portfoliovisualizer.com

You can go to https://www.portfoliovisualizer.com/backtest-portfolio to build and back test several portfolios.

For Europeans, there is also the curvo.eu backtester which I will discuss later.

My ETFs for H2 2025

We are now 6 months into 2025 and it is looking like Trump's devastating tariffs and his 'Big Beautiful Bill' is not going to be allowed to go ahead in it's entirety.

It may be that now is a good time to invest some spare cash that I may hold because it is looking like 'play time' will soon be over and the grown-ups will start to take charge of the USA soon.

Hot Tip: Crypto shares up 200+% in last month!

In the last month, the Bitcoin-oriented share ALTBG (Euro) has gained over 200% to date (11:00 BST 21-May-2025). They went up 168% in the last week!

This company has pledged to buy a large amount of BitCoin and seems to be rocketing. It often has a trading halt on it for a few hours but it is currently trading.

Warning: Marks & Spencer cyber hack - hackers now have all my customer details!

I received this email yesterday from M&S about the 'cyber incident' they suffered recently (although it seems they knew since Feb.2025!). 

It says that criminals have obtained my 'contact details, date of birth and online order history' and goes on to assure me that no usable card or payment details or passwords were obtained.

New Windows 10/11 AutoUnattend.xml generator

E2B, agFM and Ventoy allow you to use an unattend XML file with your Microsoft Window 10/11 ISO. This allows you to specify settings and components for your Windows install as well as semi- or fully-automate the install.

Previously, I have recommended the online Windows Answer File Generator (WAFG) but the site seems to no longer exist...

Legacy Boot with persistence for Kaspersky Rescue Disk ISO 2025 using E2B (grub4dos)

Here is how to get the KRD2025 ISO to legacy boot on E2B with user file persistence and with update file persistence.

1. Download the krd.iso file and save it to \_ISO\LINUX folder as KRD2025.iso.

2. Download the Ventoy pre-made 'backend' persistence files contained within the images.zip and extract ONE of the following persistence files as a .dat file using 7zip. I tried the 2gb one.

How I made 30% in one week from the current market chaos

It is possible to buy an ETN such as £3STP or €3STE which shorts TESLA shares.

The GraniteShares 3x Short Tesla Daily ETP seeks to track the Solactive Daily Leveraged 3x Short Tesla (-3x) index. The Solactive Daily Leveraged 3x Short Tesla (-3x) index tracks the three times leveraged inverse performance of the Tesla share on a daily basis.

The ETN's TER (total expense ratio) amounts to 0.99% p.a.. The ETN replicates the performance of the underlying index synthetically with a swap. The dividends in the ETN are accumulated and reinvested in the ETF.

The GraniteShares 3x Short Tesla Daily ETP is a small ETN with 18m GBP assets under management. The ETN was launched on 29 June 2020 and is domiciled in Ireland.

GraniteShares 3x short TESLA (Ticker 3STE) is an ETN that shorts TESLA by a negative factor of x3.

As long as I have some spare cash, then using a 'short' or 'inverse' fund allows me to hedge my portfolio but without selling any shares in my portfolio.

If you use Trading 212, use the Search page and look for 'Inverse ETFs' in the sidebar under the 'ETFs' heading.

This Euro sector ETF has gone up 30% in just 6 months!

Investors have secretly been moving away from S&P 500 stocks to Euro stocks. The past, excellent performance of the S&P 500 was mainly dependent on Tech stocks and due to recent events in AI and Elon Musk and his buddy DJT, etc. investors now think that Euro stocks have been undervalued in recent years.

Can I build a long-term Global ETF portfolio to rival the S&P 500?

The S&P 500 has historically shown very good and consistent gains, however the USA is proving to be quite a volatile market this year (2025) and so a more widely diversified portfolio would seem a sensible option.

However, investing in the whole global core market - e.g. Core MSCI World (ETF SWDA with 1,300 holdings) gives us diluted performance as it contains over 1000 stocks.

Now in my current portfolio, I have cherry-picked some S&P 500 stocks by using sector S&P 500 ETFs which have shown good performance and which I believe may continue to show good performance, such as:

• Tech - e.g. IITU or XLKQ
• Communications - e.g. IUCM
• Commodities - e.g. COMM
• Finance - e.g. IUFS
• Consumer - e.g. IUCD
• Utilities - e.g. IUSU

But what if I build a portfolio based on these sectors but using specially selected global market shares instead?

Easy2Boot 2.21 released

I uploaded a new version of E2B yesterday.

Very little has changed. The main thing was to test for the presence of wmic.exe in your Windows filesystem because new installations of Windows 11 will no longer have this once standard but now deprecated Windows utility.

Wmic.exe can be added into Windows 11 using the Optional Features option...

A new Windows 11 installation may not include the WMIC utility by default. See here

Add WMIC using: Windows 11 – Settings (Winkey+I) – Apps – Optional Features – View Features – WMIC – Install
A Windows restart/reboot my be required after installing WMIC.

Raindrops on roses... (a few of my favourite ETFs)

Raindrops on roses and whiskers on kittens 

Bright copper kettles and warm woolen mittens

Brown paper packages tied up with strings

These are a few of my favorite things [ETFs]

I do use a small part of my investment portfolio to buy individual company stocks like NVidia or Amazon or Tower Resources (big fail!), but as I am no expert in company analysis, I tend to only break even with these at the best of times! The problem is always when one stock dives significantly - I have learnt that slow and steady is better than risking any significant loss in just one stock as it takes ages to recover from that loss.

Index ETFs on the other hand will never go down to zero and usually tend to go up or at least keep pace with inflation.

The only exception is if I (stupidly) buy a very risky stock. In this case, I will buy it inside my GIA account so that if I make a loss, I can deduct that loss from my total gains and thus pay less CGT. If it makes a large gain, then I don't mind paying the CGT! On the other hand, if I held it inside my ISA and I lost 90% of it, I cannot even make use of that loss and it will take months to get that money back from my other investments. Trading outside of an ISA does sometimes have an advantage in that you can deduct that loss from your gains.

The ETFs I have listed below are my current favourites.

My ratio of holdings in these however will vary depending on the current stock market climate.

My favourite ETFs, ordered by fund size.

I tend to not sell ETFs such as SWDA, XDEQ, XLKQ, HMWS, CSP1 and EQQQ, and so I hold these in my SIPP and GIA accounts and don't sell them so as not to incur capital gains tax.

Tech stocks down today by 6% - here's what I am doing (27-Jan-2025)

The recent news that the latest open source release on GitHub of Chinese-based DeepSeek (equiv. to ChatGPT, OpenAI, etc.) is supposedly 95% cheaper than current US solutions using high-end nVidia chips.

Others are saying it gives a x30 performance improvement, taking much less time to teach it and less power to run it.

The stock market (S&P, Tech) is panicking as there certainly does seem to be some truth to the claims.

S&P 500 (2025-01-27)

Ventoy 1.1.00 is released today

At long last, a new version of Ventoy  (not 'Ventoy for Easy2Boot') has been released by LongPanda.

Ventoy 1.1.00 download

• 2025/01/22 --- 1.1.00 发布

1. Update to latest Shim (Fix verifying shim SBAT data failed) (#2947)
2. Support eweOS ISO (#3068)
3. Fix the boot issue of SystemRescue 11.02+ (#2958) (#3058)

Online calculator for UK Capital Gains Tax using www.cgtcalculator.com (examples for Interactive Investor and Trading 212)

I have a General Investment account with Interactive Investor, but I found it very painful to calculate my UK Capital Gains Tax liability on my Stocks and Shares sales.

Then someone on the ii forum suggested I try www.cgtcalculator.com and it seems to be pretty good. It seems to understand the same day rule, Section 104 rule and the 30-day rule.

If you don't know what the 30-day rule (bed-and-breakfast rule) is, then watch this video (see example 1) and here. Note selling shares of ABC on Trading 212 for instance, but then buying ABC a few days later on Interactive Investor also counts in the 30-day rule (AFAIK)! 

If you have several GIA accounts, you should combine all trades into one table (CSV, XLSX, etc.) first, before calculating gains/losses and CGT.

So here are my simple steps to calculate gains/losses for CGT purposes. I also include a Trading 212 example.

Use a PC/Notebook and the browser.