I have always been interested in stocks and share. Strangely as a young teenager, I used to track share prices and strangely realised they almost always seemed to go up. That first got my interest.
I then used to read about Day Trading in the Times on Sunday. The idea that someone could invest £10,000 of their own money seemed like a lot; not to mention losing some of that money (or even a lot of that money).
Then I started growing up, found new interests and almost forgot about investing.
In my late twenties, I remembered my interest and decided to invest in some shares, through the Halifax Sharebuilder. Every month I would put in £200 and invest it. I held various shares, including Morrisons, Tesco’s, Tate and Lyle. Shortly after starting to invest, the country went into recession, following the start of the credit crunch. Around that time, I decided that Northern Rock might be a good buy as it was going pretty cheap. I took a chance and invested £250. Shortly after the investment the bank was nationalised and I lost all my money – some people had life savings invested in that companies shares, so I count myself lucky for the relative small amount of money I lost. I’m still not happy about the Government nationalising a bank, but there’s no point in dwelling on it.
Following the Loss, I pretty much missed out on the recovery. I could have bought RBS at 10p per share, but didn’t. I wasn’t confident in the Governments guarantees that the bank would not go under – remember Northern Rock didn’t – they pro-actively nationalised it!
I spent a great deal of time in Excel looking at the benefits of compounded interest and realised what I wanted from a share portfolio… Which ironically is just what a High Yield Portfolio offers.
