Question on Investing

pennywatch

Hi

Before I ask this question I want to say I know absolutely nothing about shares at the moment and that I take default options ie don't actually pick the shares so sorry if this is a very basic or silly question.

How do you know if the company who is investing your money is doing a good job?

How do you compare how well your investment is doing in the past few months / year with others?

For example I know that your investments can go up and down and this is normal so how do you gage if it's just the market at that time or if the company doing the default investing is not doing as well as it could be? E.g. Are there any red flags to watch out for or some sort of comparison tables or websites or reading material about this ?

Thanks

dunstonh

How do you know if the company who is investing your money is doing a good job?

There are a number of resources on the internet that give limited but sufficient data for short term performance. Trustnet and morningstar are two of the better ones.

How do you compare how well your investment is doing in the past few months / year with others?

This is not as easy as it may initially appear. For example, you may have 200 funds in a sector. However, most of those funds will have different investment styles, different risk profiles and can perform differently from each other at different points of the economic cycle. So, you have to be able to know the differences in the risk and investment styles.

You shouldn't chase returns. A fund that has done well in this period may not be suited for the next period.

If you are not able or not interested in following investments to the required level then you are better off using a multi-asset fund or two.

bigadaj

pennywatch wrote: »

Hi

Before I ask this question I want to say I know absolutely nothing about shares at the moment and that I take default options ie don't actually pick the shares so sorry if this is a very basic or silly question.

How do you know if the company who is investing your money is doing a good job?

How do you compare how well your investment is doing in the past few months / year with others?

For example I know that your investments can go up and down and this is normal so how do you gage if it's just the market at that time or if the company doing the default investing is not doing as well as it could be? E.g. Are there any red flags to watch out for or some sort of comparison tables or websites or reading material about this ?

Thanks

For basic explanation on investment then the monevator website is a good start.

It's very passive biased, ie believes that automatic trackers ar a better option than active fund managers, and that debate has gone in for years.

But it'll give you the background and general principles and explain to the extent you know roughly what to do and look out for.

slowpoke_rodriguez

If you want to compare your shares to others then maybe something like tghis is handy...

http://moneyweek.com/prices-news-charts/performance-tables/

Click on the caption at the top of each colomn and they'll arrange in your preferred order.

bigadaj

slowpoke_rodriguez wrote: »

If you want to compare your shares to others then maybe something like tghis is handy...

http://moneyweek.com/prices-news-charts/performance-tables/

Click on the caption at the top of each colomn and they'll arrange in your preferred order.

Not sure I'd point a newbie investor to individual shares, what's the old adage 'make your first million in collective investments, then have play with individual stocks'.

Pincher

If you open an account with a good website, there are charts and tools.

Typically, there's a Virtual Portfolio to let you fool around without spending any money.

If you don't want to pay to have an account, there are probably free trial periods.

slowpoke_rodriguez

bigadaj wrote: »

Not sure I'd point a newbie investor to individual shares, what's the old adage 'make your first million in collective investments, then have play with individual stocks'.

That's a new one on me. It's catchy...