The word diversification gets used in finance more often than it gets defined. People nod when they hear it, intuit that it’s something to do with not putting all your eggs in one basket, and move on. The actual mechanics of how diversification protects you, how much you need, and how easy it is to…
There’s a kind of loss most savers never see, because it never appears on a bank statement. Your balance shows £10,000 today. Twelve months from now, it still shows £10,000. Nothing has gone missing. And yet, in any meaningful sense, you have less money than you did a year ago. This is the quiet, persistent…
If you’ve come into a chunk of money and you’re trying to decide what to do with it, you’ve probably encountered two competing pieces of advice. The first is to invest the lot straight away, because time in the market beats timing the market. The second is to drip the money in gradually over a…
If you’ve started looking at where to put your first investment, you’ll have noticed that the same product appears to come in two slightly different forms. Sometimes it’s described as an index fund. Sometimes it’s an ETF. Sometimes the same global tracker is offered as both, with different ticker symbols and slightly different fees, and…
If you’ve spent any time looking into UK savings, you’ve probably encountered the word ISA more times than you can count, often used as if everyone already knows what it means. The reality is that there are four different types of ISA in the UK, each designed for a different purpose, and most people don’t…
The honest summary of risk and reward in investing is shorter than most articles on the topic. Investments that have historically produced higher returns have also produced bigger ups and downs along the way. Investments that don’t move around much don’t make you much money. That trade-off is the whole game, and almost every investing…
Go to any UK investment platform and you’ll be offered two broad types of fund. Active funds, where a manager picks investments with the aim of beating the market. And passive funds — usually called trackers or index funds — which simply mirror an index and don’t try to beat anything. The active fund will…
Working through the Lifetime ISA pros and cons is an unusual exercise, because the same product manages to be both the most generous and the most punitive ISA the UK government offers — at the same time. It hands you a 25% top-up on everything you contribute. That’s free money on a scale unmatched by…
If you’ve spent any time reading about investing — even a few articles — you’ll have noticed something odd. Whether the source is a Nobel-winning economist, a personal finance blogger, the Money pages of a broadsheet, or your slightly evangelical friend who’s read one Tim Hale book, they all eventually recommend the same thing: an…
If you’ve been investing for a while, there’s a question that probably crosses your mind every few months: am I doing this right? Sometimes the question is prompted by a market wobble, sometimes by a colleague’s confident-sounding stock tip, sometimes by a financial podcast you didn’t mean to start listening to. Whatever the trigger, the…
