Is this a platform that anyone can invest in? Like can I simply invest £100 and possibly get a return on it and cash out?
Are you based in the UK? If so, the government has decreed that Stocks and Shares ISAs are completely tax free on all gains with an annual allowance of up to £20,000.
That means you can put in £20,000 a year and anything you earn on that is tax free, but yeah you can basically invest any amount that you want down to £1.
I personally use Hargreaves Lansdown. Took me about 15-20 minutes to get me up and running on their app and they’re pretty responsive.
They aren’t the cheapest, it’s about £11 per transaction (every time you buy shares). The cheapest are probably Saxo Bank, at about £6 per transaction.
I’ve been happy with HL so far but I’m considering switching over to Saxo Bank personally.
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I completely agree with you. I’m on HL too and have no complaints as the service is top notch minus the fees. The 11.95 transaction fee is quite a joke now days considering that all these new guys like T212 are basically just commission free.
The drawback to 11.95 transaction fees are you have to trade big numbers to effectively drive down the unit cost of the commission.
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Yeah I like to trade a lot of Scandinavia/US stocks so I have to pay an FX charge of about £5-10 so I often end up paying £15-20 every time I trade which is starting to annoy me now.
Seriously considering Saxo for their lower fees and I imagine they’ll have a broader selection of shares as they’re a Scandi company.
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you must be making some good money doing it to think nothing of these fees. That said my housemate at uni was tech support for the hotdesks at JP Morgan in Canary wharf, people rented a desk for £600 a day back in 2013…
I have 2k I want to play around with, what the best way to invest it?
It’s completely disposable so both bothered about risk or long term investments
Honestly, you could just go balls to the wall and invest it all in crypto but you literally have no idea what will happen.
The gains could be huge but the losses would be capped at £2k.
If I was you, I’d probably whack in a stocks and shares ISA and get in on the Airbnb IPO happening in December and just sit on it for a while and watch it grow.
I think Airbnb will be the next bit American tech stock.
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Can he lose the original 2k with this?
What the mechanism to do this? Surely IPO will be quite high?
If it’s something you’re willing to top up over the year then defo go for an ISA. Tax free gains and puts you in a better mindset for long term growth which is good.
Trading212 offer ISAs which might be worth a look as they have a platform that allow you to make commission transactions which can really eat into your profits over time.
@Cristo defo jumping in on that AirBnB grind!
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I might be too late on this but I’ve reckoned for 12-18 months plonking money on AMD shares would be a very good investment. Their CPUs, GPUs and Console (PS5/Xbox) products are all getting stronger and stronger and coming closer to their peak. But right now they can’t get enough stock to sell, so I’d guess they’ll keep creeping upwards.
Their share price has doubled in the past year. Like I say it’s whether it’s peaked or it’s still going up but right now they can’t get enough raw material to sell
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My main bank (Barclays) offer this. I’m I better off with them or Trading212 ?
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If you’re only looking to play with for around £2k or so then I’d strongly recommend one that charges lower transaction fees.
I think it’s the first lesson you don’t want to learn first hand with them. For example I’m with HL and their transaction fees are £11.95.
So imagine buying Share A which is worth £1 a share and you want to buy 200 shares:
£1 * 200 + £11.95 = £211.95
Now in order to even break even on your money you need the share price to rise to £1.195:
£1.195 * 200 - £11.95 = £211.95
You’re basically saying you need the share to rise by 19.5% to only break even which is staggering. It’s perhaps why, unless you’re dealing in larger transactions, I recommend something like a T212 where you’re commision free.
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Has anyone used Revolut for buying shares?
I’ve a bit of crypto knocking about on there and it’s easy to manage but not sure what their share offering is like.
Oh I’ll just buy it on the HL platform a few days after it goes live. It’ll probably have a starting price between like $20-$50 (total guess on my behalf) so you can definitely buy a fair few for £2,000.
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No I wish! I didn’t have the free cash for it and to be honest, it’ll probably massively fall back within the next few weeks/couple of months after such a huge pop.
I’ll be buying in sometime in the new year when I have more of a cash buffer for rainy days.
I’m up 38% on Palantir though 
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Now I’m having second thoughts though.
Might have to sell some of my underperforming shares to free up some cash that I can put into AirBnB.
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It might be too late for me already, it’s already soared past $100bn valuation. How much further could it climb??
Also, not gonna lie, I thought Door Dash was the IPO today and Airbnb was tomorrow lol
Edit: @CliftonGeraldi
I’m not too worried now to be honest, even WallstreetBets are staying away from this one because they think it’s too much hype
Think my initial take about a buyback was right and that it’ll fall steeply quickly before making its way back up at a good pace next year.
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