Years ago we had a stocks and shares thread on the forum, now that the world seems to be turning towards a more normal I thought I’d revive it.
I do 3 things
1 - I have money in a mortgage offset account helping to pay down my mortgage faster
2 - I have a small portfolio of stocks which are all 1 year+ holds, I add to it when I see something worthwhile, I have a Motley Fool subscription and use their recommendations for the most part.
3 - I put $100 a week into Spaceship which is essentially an online unit trust which holds a variety of global stocks.
My portfolio has a range of small caps/large caps and dividend investments. My current favourites are Aurelia Mining (AMI), Mesoblast(MSB) and Washington Soul Pattinson (WSP)
Aurelia are down 20% but have undertaken an aggressive growth strategy, as long as the price of gold stays high, it’ll recover.
Mesoblast is up over 100% since I bought in and is due to announce successful trials for new stem cell treatments that could see it quadruple in the next few months.
WSP is basically an investment vehicle supplying a reliable dividend twice a year, its up 30% since I bought
Spaceship is up 4% in the 9 weeks I’ve been putting money in it. its fantastic for people who dont have the time or inclination to do research, I have a referral code that gets both of us $5 if you use it. - S8NFCZRO5L
Great thread. Spaceship sounds good, I might use that referral code.
I have most of my money in the offset account too. I don’t get loans for anything unless they are lower than the offset account. The last few cars I have bought have been using money from the offset account instead of a car loan for example.
I have some shares but haven’t been as active as I used to, thinking of starting to assess the market and invest in some more shares. Motely Fool is great!
I’ve played the gold game. Its hard unless you have a conviction on gold price rising or want to balance a large portfolio. Got out of it after a while.
Good thread. Some friends of ours wrote this article last year. They’re super smart and in a similar stage of life to us so we just copied their strategy with a slight tweaking of ratios and a focus on ‘ethical’ funds. We ended last financial year up about 15% which was pretty good for a first year of share ownership during a pandemic. Not so exciting this year - pretty close to even so far. Have also bought into half a dozen scale solar and wind investments which tend to return about 6-8%, but that’s as much to contribute to our move away from fossil fuels as for the returns.
No shit, like a lot of small/mid cap shares on the ASX there’s a lot of overt manipulation especially by shorters, I’m on for the long haul so I don’t mind so much I’m confident that their products will be approved and successful.
I opened an account a few weeks back. It’s down a bit at the moment but I like the concept of it. I’m somewhat uncomfortable with the fact that they don’t have any form of MFA (Multi-factor Authentication). I’m a bit weary of investing too much while this is the case (also reluctant to provide my tax file number).
When the pandemic hit and killed the market I was going to buy into Fortesque metals (FMG) at less than 10 bucks. I couldn’t access my Etrade account and couldn’t get through to to them on the phone so I just put it in the too hard basket. Now it is over 25 bucks grrr
Four years ago, with all that was going on in the world, my inner hippy said to me that I should improve the cosmic kharma by acting locally. So I made the only substantive change I could do, I changed my superannuation to the Global Environmental Opportunities option. In four years under this option, my Super has grown over 150% (more if you include additional contributions I made during the four year period).
Flipside to the investment stuff is reducing the cost of things like loans.
I bought my wife a corolla earlier this year and got it financed at 2.1%, the Toyota finance woman asked what my mortgage rate was, I told her and she said call your lender today and tell them you have a 3.15% offer from another lender, they’ll drop their rate to that or nearly that within a week. I did and 24 hours later they offered me 3.19%
Oh and I just financed my new car at 3.99% through a 3rd party lender.
For what it’s worth, my home loan rate at the moment (variable) is 2.84%. I could probably do better than that but I’m waiting for Athena to launch an offset account this year, once they do I will go with them. They have a good business model and are completely undercutting traditional lenders. Their current rate with 60% LVR is 2.19%. For transparency, my brother in law is the CTO.
