Investments
Aside from ipokervip I’ve got some lower variance investments on the go and just thought I’d type my thinking out loud on some of them and see if it makes any sense. I’m not qualified at all btw so don’t act on any of this pls !
Gold – I try to order gold every month and get it from a site called UK Bullion. Basically I wire them the money and get some in the post which struck me as pretty sketchy at first. I didn’t understand why they couldn’t process a credit card but, I get it the next day and it seems to be okay. Well, I mean its gold.
On a random note don’t be fooled by the pictures – 1oz of gold is tiny, like absolutely tiny.
Anyway, buying physical gold attracted to me as opposed to buying it and keeping it in a vault somewhere because its purpose is really to consolidate wealth. The time when an investor would realise a huge return on gold would be during a time of complete financial meltdown, war or some kind of anarchy. In this, admittedly far fetched situation what good is your gold being in some bank vault or held in shares ?
For me the main point of investing / saving is survival. Profit is nice, but survival is key and gold is perfect for this. Cynics would say in this kind of scenario I’d probably be better with a gun than gold though.
Anytime when there is financial instability associated with fiat currencies gold will rise because it becomes a more attractive way to store wealth.
I guess it doesn’t yield a dividend and its value can dwindle but, at the end of the day we’re talking about a finite resource that is publicly recognised as having its price controlled by the central banks and imf in order to slow down inflation – how can we not be talking about a commodity that will ultimately rise ? and I actually can’t think of a finite resource that decreases in value over time.
http://www.garynorth.com/public/4857.cfm
This guy is pretty crazy but, I’ve got a lot of time for it – probably the sort of thing you’ll love if your into conspiracy theories.
Anyway, I think you can do a lot worse than buying a few oz’s of gold. You can’t gamble them away anyway !
High Yield Deposit Bond – This is basically one of those deals where I’ve said I’ll put £x away for 1 year and take the interest. An absolutely shit investment yielding 2.8% at HSBC. I didn’t actually mean to open the account I thought I was filling out an information form online early one morning. I like this though because the money is safe and it is a better interest rate than their flexi saver which I only use as a mechanism to make sure there is never too much on my card. I’ve heard some good things about some banks abroad and will be opening an account in Gibraltar when I go over in the near future.
Shares via ISA – I’d be dumb not to have an ISA and build it up + they’re putting the limit up to £10k a year in April. So there is an opportunity to save some serious tax free money. I do it via the motley fool share dealing service although don’t have much in there at the moment because of limits. I’ve split it over 6 or 7 shares including; BP, Scottish&Southern, Severn Trent, Texaco and some other similarly boring companies my dad suggested to me that I forget. They’re all pretty solid with 6% + in dividends and they’re all involved in providing essential resources. Severn Trent are water, Scottish & Southern are electric and so on..
That’s really about it – The saving bug only hit me recently but, I don’t want this to end and have nothing to show for it. The least I can do is give myself a springboard for any other ideas I may have outwith the industry.
I’m often worried that my investments are contradictory. An easy example is my payment. Each month I’m paid in $ (so obviously enjoying the exchange rate at the moment). Now, based on some very basic economics and probably shit reasoning I would say;
1. State of USD is representative of the world’s economical climate. If the $ is strong the economy in a global sense can’t really be doing too bad ?
2. Gold needs financial uncertainty to realise healthy gains. If fiat currency is doing well, and people have faith in the market where is the need for gold ? Even as a safety net ?
So I want $ to get stronger.. but gold to go up too. I mean there is tons of stuff like this and although my reasoning isn’t perfect I want to get a sense of direction in my investments.
Buying gold and buying £ for USD is maybe like burning money in commission. Like putting £100 on Red and £100 on black and just slowly bleeding value.
As I said the most important thing is preservation of wealth and one thing I want is to always have diversity in my savings. In UK banks money is guarenteed by the government up to £50k so an example would obviously be having seperate accounts if your savings were in excess of this – pretty obvious lol.
I guess the ultimate investment is property but, nobody is giving me a mortgage anytime soon considering I’m techincally just a student but, in the next few months when I go to Gibraltar that might all change.
Wealth is always becoming more polarised – the rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer so tax havens are going to become more popular ? Its got the added benefit of establishing a legit business there too if I own property so that’s something for the future.
My favourite investments are ones I can guide and see through however. So I’m looking really forward to iPokerVIP its getting close.
