Swing trading is easy (in hindsight) but here is how ChatGPT can help!

I opened an ISA on Trading 212 and put £20k in it in April 2025 and started buying stocks. I bought a mixture of individual companies and ETFs. I tried to chase trending stocks. The idea was to use my ISA for more risky stocks which had a higher potential gain (or loss!). In April 2026 I added another £20k and bought more shares.

To date, my T212 ISA has had £40k deposits in 14 months, is at £48.6k right now and an IRR of 42-47% (depending on Hormuz daily variations). 

The question is, could I simply have bought an index fund and done any better for a lot less stress, time and effort?

Trading 212 184k portfolio update

After a disastrous Friday last week, my portfolio has climbed back a bit.

I had some uninvested cash in my T212 accounts, so I took the market dip as a buying opportunity and nearly all £140k of my deposits are now invested.

My all time high was £191k, so my portfolio has not quite fully recovered.

My purchases at the beginning of the week to pick up 'cheap' stocks included:

LLY

META

CME

INTL

MRVL

HPE

AMAT

AVGO

OSCR

SNDK

CSKR

I sold Zevra Therapeutics for a £500 profit (approx 30%) and Elevancc Health for £100 profit.

Portfolio holdings

ISA (£48k - £40k deposited)

OKLO is my biggest loser here. If I sold OKLO now, I would take a £1.1k loss inside my ISA (43%), but unless there is any sudden government investment news, I don't see it improving much. 

Investing in nuclear is a long-term bet and OKLO seems to be just one of many horses in the race but it is backed by Sam Altman (approx $800 million). OKLO is only projected to become profitable in 3 years time. It's share price may go up by 20% this year if I am lucky but most likely it will continue to drift down. OKLO has plenty of cash but is dependent on government energy schemes and a single contract with META. I am going to hold on to OKLO at least until early July for any news of progress (source). Some good news could give a big boost to the share price.

GIA (£136k - £100k deposited)

My losers are mainly gold and silver miners, esp. Lundin Gold and Equinox Gold and OKLO.

I am hoping that the gold miners reports in August will see an increase in their price.

Best performers

Here are some of my best performers in my GIA

I have already top-sliced some of these and my other good performers (MU, SNDK, WDC, AMD, Hynix, etc.).

It may look like I am £36k up in my GIA, but I have crystalised about £10k of gains and HMRC will want their share of these gains next year (minus any tax loss harvesting) - so it is -£2-3k worse than this after deducting taxes!

Note: This is not investment advice and the stocks above have been bought over a period of 1-2 years and may not be such good investments now.

Trading 212 179k portfolio update 2026-06-05

We saw a rapid drop on Friday 5th June 2026 for Tech. stocks including CPU and memory companies. At the end of last week (end May), my portfolio was at £189k so it has lost £10k.

I had set some limit buys and stop losses and most of them triggered. I don't normally do that because it lets the broker (or their agent) see my limits and deliberately stop me out, but this week, because of the insane price rises on some stocks, I wanted to be prepared for a sell-off.

Here are my buys and sells for the first week in June (profit shown for sells in ISA and GIA)...

The rise of AI and what shares to buy next (Dell, HP, Lenovo, etc.)

On the 30th May I tipped various companies including HP, Dell, etc.

I put some limit buys on Trading 212 and managed to pick up HPE for $43. On June 1st it shot up and is now at $59.

Hewlett Packard Enterprise reports record second-quarter results and accelerates its long-term financial goals by two years, underscored by solid demand for artificial intelligence data centers, while Google-owner Alphabet unveils a plan to raise $80 billion in equity capital.

I also had an order for Cisco but it has not yet reached my buy price.

What to buy next?

How to get $Billions for the NHS instead of us paying $Billions!

MPs are currently deciding about a single patient record and are talking about improving GP and Hospital access via combining digital records.

There are concerns over data safety, but what they are not talking about is the value of this data (perhaps deliberately?).

The fact is that the health records of all the population (past and present) of population of 50+ million first-world people is worth an absolute FORTUNE!

UKCGT.xyz capital gains calculator now supports Freetrade .csv files + StockWatcher page

I was sent a sample .csv file for Freetrade and asked to include support for it, so this has now been added this morning into v4.10 onwards.

Please let me know if you find any issue.

StockWatcher

Trading 212 £189k portfolio update 2026-05-29 + tips

 A bumper week, mainly due to positive news on the Hormuz Strait.

My 1 yr IRRs are 47% (GIA) and 43% (ISA)
My all time IRRs (approx 2 yrs) are 95% (GIA) and 55% (ISA)

I decided to spend a little of the spare cash I held in the accounts to top up on the following:

Want cheaper AI - use Deepseek!

After using Codex and ChatGPT 5.5 is was very, very impressed. I subscribed to the Plus model for approx. £17 a month (first month is free).

The rise of AI and how to profit from it!

I have been using ChatGPT 5 with Codex to create html website pages and write scripts for apps - see UKCGT.xyz for an example.

I am truly amazed at the 'intelligence' of the system. There were no hallucinations or serious code mangling or reversals. It just worked beautifully. What I did in a few days would have taken me months in the past.

I can see why there is so much money pouring into AI, but we must remember it is mainly doing what other people have already done before. It uses designs and algorithms that other coders have already developed.

However, I have quickly run into a snag - and that is I am running out of £money!

You see, I bought a Codex Plus subscription for approx. £17/month (first month free), but what they don't tell you is that this limits you to a max. of 5 hour sessions and approx. 40 minutes of ChatGPT 'thinking time'. After that, it wanted me to upgrade to a £100/month subscription or wanted me to wait a week for my next month's subscription to start.

This started me thinking. Many businesses are starting to see the power of AI. Many businesses are reducing their staff and paying AI subscriptions instead. Only 3 junior staff are needed where 10 were needed before, because those 3 can do the work of 10 and are good enough to check the work for bugs, etc.

So I can see the AI revolution timeline like this:

Trading 212 £182k Portfolio update 22/05/2026 + tips

Not much change. The two portfolios went down a lot but then slowly recovered.

I topped-up in the Invest account and made a few new buys...

Trading 212 £182k Portfolio progress update 15/05/2026

It was all going so well until Friday!

At the end of Thursday my T212 portfolios totalled £186k and my Invest account reached 100% IRR - but then came Friday...

I still cannot complain though as my IRR numbers are still is Invest 86% and ISA 42%.

Recent purchases

New share capital gains calculator site ukcgt.xyz is born!

Yesterday, I quickly created a new website at ukcgt.xyz. Since .co.uk and .com were already taken, I went with the .xyz domain as easy2boot.xyz uses it and it was the cheapest!

The new Hostinger site uses the same code as the ukcg page on the easy2boot.xyz site. I will put a link on the easy2boot.xyz page to point users to the new site soon.

Trading 212 and Interactive Investor .csv files have been well tested. I have also tested one Barclays .csv which seems to work OK. The cgtcalculator.com format and a few others are also supported (you can paste the text in or load in from a .txt file). Hargreaves Lansdown csv support has also been added.

The new UKCGT site has a Forum, so please feel free to ask questions or report issues.

If you want support added for a broker format, I must send me an example .csv file of a real UK-based account. You can mangle any ID numbers if you wish and reduce the rows, but any heading lines at the start should not be omitted or changed (I would prefer a freshly downloaded file - preferable one with an example of different types of orders and some stock splits).

Simplest format for data entry

You can type or paste in a simple format such as the one below, with just the number of shares (qty) and price per share in £ if you wish.

B  01/03/2018   SWDA                 1000         3.6093        

B  28/08/2018   SWDA                 1000         4.1565     

S  28/11/2019   SWDA                 2000         4.6702      

B  05/12/2019   SWDA                  500         4.7012         

B  12/02/2020   EQQQ                  150         210.45         

B  18/03/2021   EQQQ                  100          247.8        

S  04/04/2021   EQQQ                  120          305.6         

B  10/06/2021   EQQQ                   50          299.2       

S  15/03/2022   EQQQ                   80          318.4   

Two extra columns for fees and tax will be added as zero when you click Calculate. The Price per share you use should be the Net price - e.g.  (total cost + tax + fees / no. of shares) = net price.

Other calculators

I have given links to some other calculators if you want to compare results.

UKCGT - Capital Gains calculator for Trading 212, Barclays, Interactive Investor, LightYear, AJ Bell and cgtcalculator.com files

In just a matter of a just few more hours, with the help of ChatGPT and Codex, I have made a Capital Gains calculator page on a new website which accepts T212, Barclays, Interactive Investor and some other formats.

https://ukcgt.xyz

It has a 'Test' button if you want to try it quickly on a few trades.

It should give the same results as the cgtcalculator.com or the UK Tax calculator sites. I have tested it on T212, ii and Barclays .csv files. It also works on pasted or loaded trades text which are in the cgtcalculator.com format. I have not tested it much on the other broker formats as I don't have any current .csv download files.

This makes calculating Capital Gains much easier, especially if you use more than one broker.

How I made my 'cgtcalculator.com' converter and web apps using ChatGPT

I wanted to make a converter utility which would turn a transaction report downloaded from Trading 212 into a format suitable for cgtcalculator.com. Initially I asked ChatGPT to make it in Python, but later I asked it to make an .html page with the script inside it.

The initial development of the Python code took about half a day using ChatGPT. The next day I added the html code to my easy2boot.xyz website as a 'private' page which you can see here.

The HMRC 30-day share matching rule explained

When calculating capital gains tax, UK investors have to allow for three important HMRC rules which affect the 'cost price' of the shares that you sold. The cost price is important because it is used to calculate the gain or loss...

The gain/loss is                NET SELL PRICE   -  NET COST PRICE

Trading 212 £183k Portfolio progress update 8/05/2026

Overall I am up £8k this Saturday morning after a very good week due to good tech stock reports this week. Over 300 of the 500 companies in the S&P 500 have now reported their latest quarterly results.

Overall, I am now £43k up after 26 months of building up my accounts (£140k total deposits) and they are showing pretty good IRRs. It would be a shame to feel the effects of a market collapse now!

Invest IRR is 91% (49% last 12 months)       ISA IRR is 45% (46% last 12 months)

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.

Stock Tip - Sage plc seems good value to me

 Full disclosure - I hold shares in Sage (currently at a loss). I intend to sell my shares before April 5th to generate a loss for CGT purposes and then rebuy inside my ISA after April 5th and increase my holding.

As well as being undervalued, it has a good dividend yield and good future growth.

Here is ChatGPT's view on Sage.....

How I use AI for investing

AI can hallucinate (it makes stuff) and can lie, however it can be very useful to get some ideas on investing.

Many analysts reduce the current global economic cycle to four big forces:

Trumps latest tariffs - what shares am I buying now?

DJTs latest petulant fit of pique seems to be the final nail in the coffin for non-USA investors. It seems that Europe do not want to depend on the USA for goods and services any more, and many large, unfinalised USA contracts are now on hold or even cancelled.

In particular, very large European defence contracts and energy contracts with the USA are in jeopardy.

This gives an even greater boost to EU and UK defence companies and also to large Emerging Markets companies, especially those in Korea and China.

T212 Trading £157k update 2026-02-20

I have not made many changes in my Trading 212 ISA or Investment accounts in the last month except for the selling of my FTSE RAFI PSRU ETF shares as the ETF was closing down.

I am trying to diversify my holdings but still select countries and sectors which I think will do well in 2026.