Biggest Investing Mistakes

gadgetmind

Paying an IFA 5% up front and then 0.5%pa for doing very little.

agent69

• Buying a timber framed house in the early 80's just before the World in Action expose

• Not selling JPM natural resources when my IFA recommended it

gadgetmind

agent69 wrote: »

Not selling JPM natural resources when my IFA recommended it

Did he recommend you to buy or sell? Generally speaking, when IFAs, daily newspapers and the man in the pub are telling you to hop onboard, is usually time to run for the exits.

agent69

gadgetmind wrote: »

Did he recommend you to buy or sell?

I had a few £k in JPM in an ISA when I changed advisers. It had gone up about 25% in no time so I was reluctant to ditch it (despite the new IFA describing it as a frothy stock) .

I ditched the fund about 6 months later, by which time it had dropped 30%.

win some loose some as they say.

mollycat

agent69 wrote: »

win some loose some as they say.

Mmmmm...or not.

BananaRepublic

Fifteen years ago putting six thousand pounds in a Japan PEP. It is almost back up to six thousand pounds.

Receiving shares from a company I once worked for, selling them and putting the money in a pension months before they rocketed in value from £1,000 to about £40,000.

Snakey

Not buying in London as soon as I moved down here (1999). By the time I did buy, flats in my area were getting on for three times the price.

Keeping my savings in a Cash ISA in the belief that investing in the stock market was only for experts and that as an amateur I would most likely lose my shirt. And not knowing that thing about banks dropping their interest rates without telling you.

Without those two mistakes, I might be able to semi-retire today at 43.

Malthusian

Bothering with individual shares. A while back I invested just under 10% of my portfolio in a handful of shares, four blue chip and one that was a pure punt. (Not many, I know, but it wasn't a large sum and more diversification would have meant too much in transaction fees, of which I paid too much as it was.) The punt and one of the blue chips tanked, one was sold at about par and the other two did very well, so as a whole I lost nothing and gained nothing.

So in investment terms, given the timeframe, there wasn't a lot wrong with it. It's just that it was a total waste of time and mental energy thinking about which shares to buy. I should have just stuck the money in a tracker fund and used the time saved to do something more useful / play Football Manager.

The logic behind buying blue chips was that they would complement my main portfolio (which is virtually all trackers), deliver consistent dividends with no fees taken off, and any fluctuations would be ironed out over time. But my experiment has shown me that paying 0.1% - 0.2% a year to have your investment spread across thousands of shares, reducing volatility and virtually eliminating the risk of irrecoverable loss, is easily worth it.

TadleyBaggie

Not exercising 1500 stock options @ $16 when the stock price hit $80. And then still holding on as the stock price dropped to $50, then $30, then $20, then $5...

libra10

About 8 years ago I wanted to sell our Halifax windfall shares, but my husband thought it would be like selling the family silver ...


The rest is history!