Your last investment?

Reckless_Saving

Lloyds Banking Group, top up existing holding.

• banking currently unloved but feel Lloyds is making good progress to getting back to being a boring bank.
• short term volitility giving top up opportunities
• LBG has progressive dividend / buyback policy, dividends are rising, although in short term with brexit caution
• They're buying companies that will help them grow.
• Government will fully sell out of the holding within next 2 months
• PPI resolution has a deadline date and hopeful a clearer processing path their after.
• at some point the markets will twig they're undervalued

Main reason is I'm hopeful of it's dividend potential over the long term and that share price will keep pace with the increasing dividend yield, getting in at this stage will hopefully workout in the years to come. In a similar way it worked for me with BT, bought in around 100p, dividends currently around 14p and you know the share price, down but not out.

Smed

London Capital and Finance 3 year Income Bond 8% p.a. interest paid quarterly. Note high risk and speculative. Return dependent on performance of loans made to S.M.E.s. Asset backed. No guarantee scheme. No F.S.C.S. Regulated and authorised by F.C.A.

george4064

In January, I switched 2 individual UK holdings with iShares S&P 500 ETF Acc (CSP1). I needed to reduce UK exposure and add US exposure and I had been considering an US ETF for a while, I ignored the fact that the ETF was at all time highs because it was required to diversify my portfolio.

Thrugelmir

economic wrote: »

no

value stocks are stocks bought on high dividend yield usually and investors have bought these for income, as rates rise there is less need for them and so they sell off. there is a strong correlation.

A high dividend yield alone does not equate to value. Value stocks may offer good dividend yields with potential for future growth. Value investors don't buy stocks on yield alone instead look at the underlying fundamentals of the business.

bowlhead99

Smed wrote: »

London Capital and Finance 3 year Income Bond 8% p.a. interest paid quarterly. Note high risk and speculative. Return dependent on performance of loans made to S.M.E.s. Asset backed. No guarantee scheme. No F.S.C.S. Regulated and authorised by F.C.A.

Note 'authorised by FCA' is largely irrelevant in this context as what they are authorised to do is act as a credit broker (and limited to secondary broking, at that). They need that authorisation to be able to lend money to people after you have handed them your cash, but it doesn't really do anything to protect you as an investor.

If you like higher risk speculative investments, I think the risk/reward is better buying something like Lloyds Bank's preference shares which yield about 6.5% and paid twice a year, are listed on a stock exchange rather than being non-transferrable, and are effectively secured on the assets of a £50bn banking business rather than on a few tens of millions of loans selected by a company with only a few years of operating history. The payment comes off your dividend allowance rather than interest allowance which will give a better tax result for some people although not for others.

If LC&F were offering double digit returns on their bonds as some of the P2P places do, they would perhaps be more interesting - although FCA authorised P2P seems better than non-FCA authorised private company engaged in bond trading for its own account with your money. There are lots of threads about LCF here which are mostly incredibly negative because the various OPs have believed that the bonds are an alternative to cash deposit accounts due to the way they are marketed via some dodgy websites - when as you pointed out they are of course highly speculative with 100% loss of capital potential. There are other things with loss of capital potential that are more mainstream/ less risky for similar potential returns IMHO.

Thrugelmir

EdGasket wrote: »

Don't follow that idiot. He recommended both naibu Global and CamKids which both turned out to be worthless Chinese scams that went bust and lost investors all their money!

How much did you personally have invested?

EdGasket

Thrugelmir wrote: »

How much did you personally have invested?

Not a huge amount percentage-wise but no fun losing money like that. You'd have thought that the brokers/nomads/LSE would have at least confirmed the companies actually existed other than on paper! Guess so long as they take their fee they don't care. It gives the AIM market, the Chinese, and Investors Chronicle a very bad name! Simon Thomson did no more than run the shares through a stock screener; he had both NBU and CAMK in his portfolio of undervalued companies without doing any proper checks (yeah OK I should have done them too; no more foreign AIM companies for me).