Gostevie's Blog
My postings on things investment-related - and perhaps more.
Welcome to my first blog post! Older readers may recognise that the title refers to the catchphrase of CJ, Reggie's boss in the classic 70s sitcom The Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin. Not that I am anything like CJ (at least I hope not!) but the purpose of this post is to give a bit of background into how I got into investing. I can't say that as a child growing up in the 1970s or even as a young man I showed any interest in business or investment. No stories of selling things to my schoolmates at a profit - a couple of my classmates did that - or starting a business from a phone box from me. I was vaguely aware of the stock market through the financial pages of the Evening News (my Dad always thought the sports pages in there were better than the Evening Standard) but that was about it. In the late 80s/early 90s I worked at a place where a few of my colleagues invested in shares but in those pre-internet days it was a world away from the way most of us do it today and still of no interest to me. If anything I mildly disapproved as I was a bit of a leftie back then! On the contrary, by the early 2000s, I found myself in quite a bit of consumer debt with loans and credit cards. Hey, it was the thing to do in those days, I mean what could possibly go wrong? It was through seeking inspiration as to how to get out of that debt that I came across The Motley Fool UK website and its now defunct bulletin boards; and indeed boards with titles like 'Dealing with Debt' and 'Living Below Your Means' did indeed inspire me to get myself debt-free. But through that site's 'Best of' board, which would feature a sort of hit-parade of the most recommended - or 'recced' - posts of the past 24 hours, I also discovered all these other boards with unusual names like 'Paulypilot's Pub' and 'High Yield Portfolio', which were all about investing - and in particular investing in individual companies listed on the stock market. For some reason - perhaps in part due to the brilliance of some of the regulars who posted there - I became fascinated by this whole new world and the chat about P/E Ratios, RNSs and 'multibaggers'. The attraction of being an investor rather than a debtor was perhaps my biggest inspiration of all when it came to paying off those credit cards and loans. My first ever purchase on the stock market was made in April 2005 - long before I got out of debt actually, which is not something I'd recommend to anybody also trying to clear debts, but I was keen to get started. That purchase - made using Hargreaves Lansdown's telephone broking service - was 326 shares in what was then called Lloyds TSB (LLOY), at a price of 458.59p, chosen because it was a 'safe' cash-generative dividend-paying FTSE 100 blue chip that wasn't likely to get into financial difficulty anytime soon! Fortunately for me, I sold out in December 2005 at a price of 471.32p (also having collected a couple of dividends along the way), a couple of years before the financial crisis of 2007/8. Not, I hasten to add because of any great foresight on my part. More, I think, because it meant I could use the proceeds to pay off another one of my credit cards. Over the next seven years or so I continued to make small investments on an ad hoc basis. Some were successes, such as a sort of ambulance chasing compensation seeker called Accident Insurance (ACE) which by pure fluke I timed just right, and some were failures, such as that pioneer of flat-surface loudspeakers (which they never could make sound any less tinny than a transistor radio playing in next door's bathroom!) called NXT (NTX). All of this was very valuable learning, but it was still all just dabbling until I finally became debt-free in March 2012 and set about getting enough capital saved that I could do it more seriously, which took about a year. Coincidentally, it was during this same period of time that a change in the rules regarding the transfer of Guaranteed Minimum Pensions (GMPs) meant that I could move a very old occupational pension, which until then I was stuck with, into a SIPP in January 2013. Then, in March of the same year, I opened my first online broker account - a Sponsored CREST Account with Stocktrade. So in the space of a few months I had not one but two small portfolios to look after! I felt I was up-and-running as a 'proper investor' at last... And that seems like a good point at which to bring this first post on this blog to an end. Apologies for the somewhat self-indulgent nature of it but I did want to set the scene. Hopefully future posts will be a bit more useful. At this point though, I'd like to acknowledge publicly that my main inspiration for starting this blog has been the example of my good friend WheelieDealer who has been doing his own one for a few years now and whose skill and expertise - both in picking stocks and in writing about his rationale for doing so - is something I can only aspire to. His website can be found here: wheeliedealer.weebly.com/. Do have a look - especially at his extensive blog archive: wheeliedealer.weebly.com/blog. There is some wonderfully educational stuff in there. Many thanks for reading this. If you have any comments or suggestions do please leave them below. All the best, Gostevie
1 Comment
|
Welcome to my Blogs
This is where I post my ramblings on things investment related - and maybe things non-investment related as well from time to time. ArchivesCategories |