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.

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?

The great Hedging Experiment!

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.

New IODD Mini Pro (no more E2B\Ventoy Secure Boot and WinPE issues!)

IODD have just released the new IODD Mini Pro which has a USB 3.1Type C USB connector and improved firmware.

'.RMD' is used for removable media devices, '.VHD' for fixed devices

The Mini Pro is available in capacities of 512GB ($149), 1TB ($185) and 2TB ($248).

Key Changes to the IODD MINI PRO:

New Interface: The adoption of a USB-C type port has significantly

improved its versatility and convenience.

Expanded Storage: It now supports 80mm M.2 SSDs, a change from the

previous 42mm, allowing for a wider variety of capacities and models.

Effective Heat Control: We’ve applied new materials to effectively

reduce heat, ensuring stable performance even during extended use.

Enhanced Security: The encryption password length has been increased

from a maximum of 16 to 76 digits, making security even more robust.

I found an amazing new managed Global fund (37% gain in a year, 150% in five years)!

Back in April 2023, I decided to add an actively managed fund to my portfolio. I chose the Royal London Global Equity Select Fund (Acc) and for 2023 and early 2024 it  proved to be a good choice.

However, the fund manager and  it's Alpha managers left Royal London in April 2024 and since then the performance of this fund has been disappointing to say the least (4% vs. 11% for a benchmark global equity fund)...

Fix for WinPE ISOs (e.g. Ankh Tech WinPE) not fully working from agFM menu system

You may find that some WinPE ISOs boot to the WinPE Desktop OK, but some Desktop icons may be missing or not functional or some shortcuts report a 'Drive Y: not found' error message.

The problem is that many WinPE ISOs are actually designed to be extracted onto a USB drive and not actually booted from an ISO file. In some cases the WinPE startup files may look for the ISO on a drive (so it can mount it as drive Y:) but may not find it.

For instance the Ankh Tech WinPE ISOs an Easy2Boot USB drive may work OK if you legacy boot (and add a _.isope01 suffix to the filename) in legacy BIOS boot mode from the E2B menu system or if using the Ventoy menu, but if Legacy or UEFI booting to the agFM menu, the WinPE ISO may boot OK, but some Desktop and Start Menu items in WinPE may not run.

Another recent share purchase - Comfort Systems (FIX)

I have recently bought shares in Comfort Systems (FIX) on Trading 212 for £500...

Time to switch to unhedged ETFs for UK/EU investors (EQQQ vs EQGB)?

Generally, there is not much difference between hedged and unhedged ETFs for UK investors over the long term, however due to the weakening dollar to GBP rate, instead of buying the Nasdaq 100 ETF EQQQ, I have been buying the hedged ETF version EQGB (which has a higher TER of 0.35% compared to 0.30%) because the performance difference has been quite marked.

In the above chart, we see the hedged EQGB has massively outperformed the unhedged EQQQ so far this year. Almost a 9% difference in the last 6 months is quite a difference!

However, if we look at the performance over just the last month, I can see that the unhedged ETF EQQQ has shown a return of 4.86% vs. 4.04% of EQGB.

I asked ChatGPT 4 which of my stocks I should sell!

ChatGPT can be sent files and asked to comment on them, so I uploaded my Trading 212 Account Statement for July 2025 and asked it to identify the stinkers!

Trading 212 download PDF

I then asked it to identify which ones to sell...

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.

Trumps Big Beautiful Bill will weaken the S&P 500 for non-US investors!

Trump's Big Beautiful Bill is expected to weaken the dollar even more as it will increase the USA debt level and weaken US bonds.

During the last 6 months the EUROUSD rate has gone from 1.02 to 1.13 and has been predicted to reach 1.2 in the next 6 months (see chart below).

For UK/EURO investors, the dollar exchange rate has caused a 9% hit on the S&P 500.

Early Amazon Prime Day Deals

There are early Amazon Prime deals available now before Amazon Prime day which officially start midnight Tuesday 8 July! For instance, The 10" Fire Tablet (#Ad) is less than £90 with screen protector.

You can get the 64GB model  (#Ad) for just £103 saving almost £100!

I recently purchased some clip-on, polarised sunglasses (#Ad) for my prescription glasses. At the moment two pairs are less than £6 and they are both of very high quality.

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.

What is a 'safe' and simple investment stock portfolio for family and friends?

I am often asked by family and friends what they should invest in. This is an extremely difficult question because I don't want to be disowned by them if they lose their money!

Stock and Shares investment is a long term commitment. 

They can go up-diddly-up-up or down-diddly-down-down! 

Be prepared - in some years your investment pot may decrease a lot in value but don't sell!

If you can't stand to see your portfolio lose 20% in a year, then you could choose a nice safe savings account instead! However, savings accounts barely keep up with inflation. If you are a high rate tax payer and put £100K into a savings account paying 5%, then in the UK each year you will pay 40% of that 5K interest to the tax man! If cashing out after 5 years, due to loss of compounding and the tax difference, you will be about £5K better off with a 5% gain ETF even if in a taxable S&S account, than in a 5% savings account.

When investing in Stocks and Shares we must consider:

• Is an income required (Accumulating or Dividend portfolio)?
• Tax laws in your country of residence and using them to your best advantage
• Attitude to risk and loss (would you mind if your portfolio went down 40% in a year?)
• Do you need access to the money within a few years - e.g. to buy a house or car?

Try this free website for great Stock Market heat maps!

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At last, no more Trading 212 'scam' videos!

If you use Trading 212 to invest in Stocks and Shares or a Cash ISA, you may have noticed that the main screen can be very misleading and it is impossible to know if we have performed well or badly compared to other investors.

Here is an old screenshot which used to just show the total cost price of all the current shares in the portfolio and the gain on those current shares (e.g. current gain on £100k+ account is only £182). However, we do not know how much was deposited into the account in total or what the true return is. This account could have had total deposits of £100,000 for instance, and made various buys and sells over time. £8918 made over a period of 3 months is impressive, but over 5 years it is not so great! The gain of 0.17% does not sound impressive, but if the account had £100k made in deposits, it has actually made £8918 and if that was over a period of exactly one year, that is a 9% true gain (not 0.17%)!

What are the UK equivalents of the USA ETFs like VOO, SPY, VTI, VT, QQQ, VTV, SCHD, etc.?

ETFs like VOO (Vanguard S&P 500 ETF) and SCHD (Schwab U.S. Dividend Equity ETF) are not available on UK broker platforms such as Trading 212, Interactive Investor, etc.

You may have seen YouTube videos which recommend these ETFs.

Here are some equivalents which are usually available to UK and non-USA citizens.

Whole market Funds

VT & VTWAX

Debugging grub2 menus that won't fully boot (e.g. ArchLinux ISOs)

If you need to construct a grub2 menu, but then find that it does not work, you can add in some extra debug lines. For instance the grub2 read command will wait for you to press the RETURN key before continuing execution and an echo command can be used to track progress and view grub2 variable values.

Here is an example grub2 menu display output screen...

and here is the grub2 menu that was used...

menuentry "Arch Linux with Parameters" {

set iso_path="/_ISO/LINUX/archlinux-2024.12.01-x86_64.iso"

search --no-floppy -f --set=root $iso_path

probe -u $root --set=archiso_img_dev_uuid

loopback loop $iso_path

ls

echo

ls (loop)/

echo

ls /

echo

ls /_ISO/LINUX/

echo

echo archiso_img_dev_uuid=${archiso_img_dev_uuid}  iso_path=${iso_path}  root=${root} 

read

linux (loop)/arch/boot/x86_64/vmlinuz-linux archisobasedir=arch img_dev=UUID=${archiso_img_dev_uuid} img_loop=${iso_path}

initrd (loop)/arch/boot/x86_64/initramfs-linux.img

read

}

This menu sets iso_path to the path of the ISO file we wish to boot.

Should I buy this ETF due to the forthcoming ban on TikTok?

TikTok is set to be banned in US law from the beginning of 2025 unless it changes ownership from the current Chinese Bytedance owners. If banned, will other Western countries follow suit too?

If this goes ahead, there is no similar alternative to TikTok, so advertising businesses and video businesses will then go to Instagram, Facebook (both owned by Meta as well as Threads and WhatsApp) and Google/Alphabet (YouTube).

You could therefore invest in Meta and Alphabet now, but if TikTok's Supreme Court appeal is successful, or Trump somehow quashes the ruling, then you could be looking at a large loss!

The ETF IUCM also has top holdings in Meta and Alphabet and its price has increased recently.

How to prepare for a stock market crash

Warren Buffet is accumulating a great deal of cash at the moment. After selling more of Berkshire's equity portfolio, including massive portions of its stakes in Apple (AAPL -0.52%) and Bank of America (BAC 0.72%), the company ended the third quarter with a record $325 billion in cash and Treasury bills on its balance sheet. That's up $48 billion from the previous quarter.

His trick has always been to buy good companies at a low price and hold. It seems he is getting ready to buy again which perhaps means he is expecting to see a bear run and can buy good companies at a cheaper price.

WB doesn't see much gain in top quality large companies at the moment. They seem overvalued. Small/mid-cap companies are not worth his time and effort (he could buy them all outright if he wanted with $325 billion). So I think he is expecting a bit of a correction but meanwhile is probably earning a nice 5%+ on his cash pile whilst he waits.

So what should we do if the SHTF?