Now is not the time?

badger09

sebthered wrote: »

Hello playmates!
3 Months on and I have just opened an account with iweb and requested the transfer of my maturing cash isa of £ 50k . The plan is to invest it all in VLS 60 - has the consensus changed at all? invest now or wait? and if now, lump sum or drip feed?
I thank you

If you've already requested that the full £50k be transferred in one lump sum, then you might as well invest it all in one lump sum:cool:. Otherwise any uninvested cash will be losing money to inflation.

With hindsight (wonderful thing, hindsight:p) you might have been more comfortable moving your maturing ISA into an instant access one paying around 1% and transferring say £5k per month, or £12500 every 3 months and investing each lump as soon as it arrived.

Malthusian

Glen_Clark wrote: »

Its an education to look at some of the old articles on there.
Like those recommending Carillon's safe dividend etc before it crashed.

If you can find them. Usually share tipsters are clever enough to archive all historic articles older than about a month in a furnace. And, if they are especially canny, to hide articles from archive.org's crawlers. You can sometimes find old articles for some cheap laughs but I find it is hardly worth the bother to tell you something you already know (that share tips are worthless).

Jeems

If you google "Stock market crash 20xx", literally every year there are articles of impending crashes, why this is the year, all time highs etc. As someone mentioned, you'd have been up 5-6% had you invested in VLS when you first posted in Jan. Go for it!

Snakey

As an investing newbie it's taken me a long time to get my head around the idea that there isn't a "right answer" that's simply being hidden from me unless I pay a fee... there are only statements based on what's happened in the past which run along the lines of "There has historically been a 70% chance that Strategy X pays off better than Strategy Y over a period of Z years". And that therefore on any given occasion it's possible to do the right thing and still lose out, or do the wrong thing and have it pay off. Only hindsight can say what the optimum strategy on that occasion actually would have been.

It's scary - to the unsophisticated such as myself - how the whole thing has so much more in common with gambling than with "being sensible with money" which is what I thought I was doing! And yet with interest rates being so low, what's the alternative? A guaranteed loss based on inflation.

Personally, any funds earmarked for spending in more than five years' time are thrown in to the stock market. There doesn't feel like much difference between not being able to touch something for twelve years and having it taken away altogether (obviously in twelve years' time there'll be a difference, but today? Not so much), so in it goes and I try not to think about the possibility that today/this year/this decade will turn out, with hindsight, to have been one of the times when the general rule does not hold true.

If there were an alternative that would be guaranteed to pay on average the same amount with no risk to capital... but then, if there were, everybody would be doing that instead wouldn't they.

Eco_Miser

Snakey wrote: »

It's scary - to the unsophisticated such as myself - how the whole thing has so much more in common with gambling than with "being sensible with money" which is what I thought I was doing!

The big difference between gambling and investment is that gambling has a negative expectation (for the punter), and investment has a positive expectation (for everyone) because businesses generally make profits and these profits go to the investors either as dividends or as growth.

In either case reality can go against expectation, which is where risk comes into play.

AlanP_2

Snakey wrote: »

If there were an alternative that would be guaranteed to pay on average the same amount with no risk to capital... but then, if there were, everybody would be doing that instead wouldn't they.

I don't think they would in practice as you wouldn't see a "sustainable" situation where Risk-Free investments and Risk investments were paying the same return.

Market forces would cause Risk-Free return to fall or Risk return to increase so that the taking of the Risk is rewarded.

So, if Risk-Free savings accounts were typically returning 15% then investors would want 20%+ to take a Risk by going for equities.

Glen_Clark

You will always find some people saying the market is going to fall. But if the majority believed that they would sell and the market would have already fallen.
You will always find some people saying the market is going to rise. But if the majority believed that they would buy and the market would have already risen.
So the market is always about where the average investor thinks it should be.

Snakey

AlanP wrote: »

I don't think they would in practice as you wouldn't see a "sustainable" situation where Risk-Free investments and Risk investments were paying the same return.

Market forces would cause Risk-Free return to fall or Risk return to increase so that the taking of the Risk is rewarded.

So, if Risk-Free savings accounts were typically returning 15% then investors would want 20%+ to take a Risk by going for equities.

That's sort-of what I meant - if it was possible, it wouldn't be possible.

Apodemus

Malthusian wrote: »

If you can find them. Usually share tipsters are clever enough to archive all historic articles older than about a month in a furnace. And, if they are especially canny, to hide articles from archive.org's crawlers. You can sometimes find old articles for some cheap laughs but I find it is hardly worth the bother to tell you something you already know (that share tips are worthless).

Yes, I've noticed that the articles suggested on Google finance when you enter a company name will quite often come up with a couple of Motley fool articles, not far apart in time, with completely opposing views! Of course, one of them might turn out to be correct!

TomSurrey

Don't try to time the market, invest consistently in diversified stocks, in varied regions,