Just started my investment portfolio 2 weeks ago on the up thanks to moderna 
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Aa mentioned below these were stock that were initially in my ISA but then became ineligible to hold in an ISA, NIO being the main one.
Yes the lack of dividend growth is annoying. However as you say you could go for the nice yield when you buy it low like 1400 ish and under, then when it has some share price growth decide based on market what you want to do. As in some market times a 5%+ yield can help your portfolio balance out through reinvesting that cash flow into undervalued stocks etc. I think there is an argument to have GSK in your portfolio at these current prices (I do) and when it goes up you have a choice.
my position was just a bit above the 1400 so I have a yield on cost of 5.6% which is decent. once the price rises enough I will take the profits from the share price and put the funds elsewhere while waiting for it to dip below 1400 again. the dividends will go towards growing the underweight portions of my pie. I moved a lot of my OXY funds over to grow the position since I think that has found its new balance for a while so can get better returns from a GSK dividend than waiting to try and double my money via stock price on OXY when it finally returns above $25 for months longer.
GSK is very cyclical, although not yearly or seasonally it frequently goes up and then back down later, so even if you don’t sell there is an argument to be made that you can just hold and grow it once it dips however the rate of inflation cuts into those dividends and makes it effectively just 3%, so if you don’t sell high and buy low, you may as well just put your money in Realty (O) that grows the dividend year on year so it stays ahead of inflation.
IMO, nothing beats investing in a similar company who grow the dividend like Realty Income, its just a bit harder to find the value moments. I had no funds free when it went to amazing prices in march 
is this for selling or renting? 
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I don’t really keep track that much tbh, besides just rebalancing periodically.
Most of it are pies that target some industry or replicate some ETF.
I wrote a program that parses ETF excels and I wrote about how I invest/design pies here.
I only joined 3 months ago but am enjoying it after some initial big losses from which I’ve learned!
I have mine and my wife’s this years ISA’s in so that’s £40k. I put mine in in July and lost £7k in 2 weeks dabbling with stocks and getting scared and selling out. I’m now back up to £23,800. My wife’s was £20k in two weeks ago and is currently £23,250.
My Investing account has had £50k through it but runs at about £20k to play with. I’m still running a loss overall but I’m earning every month now and that’s diminishing. In November I profited £6422. The first week of December stands at £1712 profit.
I’m learning on the job but enjoying it.
DC7
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Are you on the CFD or invest side? I’m curious as to what caused such big losses.
I used to work for GSK…an excellent company
I tried CFD without knowing what I was doing, lost money. I then went Investing and again made silly mistakes. As an example I put £15K in Tesla, it dropped, I got scared and sold only for it to be the same price I bought at a week later. Newbie stupidity.
From memory I think I bought at $395 and it went down to the £360. Imagine if I’d kept it.
On my investing side now, I’ve only had 3 red days in the last 2 months and they’ve been minimal.
Are you not concerned that what you are doing is a little akin to gambling?
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To an extent but isn’t everything. I’m lucky enough to be in a position to lose it and not be in trouble.
As said, I’m making money pretty much every day now. I’m no expert but with some logic based on where I put money, things have been going well.
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For the CFD side, with the amount of money he’s using, I’d expect those returns as well. Jumping in without knowing what CFDs are in the other hand is a different story! But hopefully it is a lesson learned as it could end up being a disaster.
Isn’t everything short of buying and holding an index technically gambling?
I personally define gambling as something where the expected return is negative (or chance of having a positive return is less than 50%). I wouldn’t say everything except index funds is gambling.
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Completely agree. Gambling is where you’re putting your money into something where the odds are that you lose, investing is putting money in something which has a probability of a positive return greater than that of a loss.
The difficulty is finding these odds. It’s easy to say that casino games are gambling, because there are fixed odds that can be calculated. CFD trading has no odds, it’s all perspective. Even investing in index funds, there is no fixed odds, but the existing data makes it a near certainty of a positive return and that’s why there’s it’s agreed that it’s investing.
I’d say CFDs are odds stacked against you, and therefore can be considered a version of gambling. It’s similar to betting, there are odds but they’re not fixed. The bookmaker is deciding those odds based on the information available. That’s the same as the trader, calculating their risk. But with ~80% of people losing money, we can assume that the probability of a profit is lower than the probability of a loss- and therefore from our definition it is likely gambling.
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The stock market is gambling. Full stop.
That said, there is nothing inherently wrong with gambling.
Providing you can make informed choices to produce favourable results over the span of multiple trades, you will do well, and are using expected probability to your gain.
But having blind faith something will go up, and having blind belief some other person will later on down the line pay more for what you own. Well that’s just dumb. You’d be better off on a baccarat table.
That’s how I see it. 
The stock market isn’t gambling, most peoples approach to it is.
Speculating on the market means having a sounds plan and executing it where you control your defined risk.
Gambling is buying a basket of stocks, thinking that diversification somehow protects you and planning to hold them through whatever happens, somehow thinking that a 3% dividend offsets your capital loss , which could be 40, 50% or more in a bear market…
For people who have started this yr, this market is not normal and neither was the crash or the recovery, 3 red days in 2 months…that should worry you, not give you confidence…
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I dunno about that! At worst it’s 50/50. Just pick a direction and hope it works out. But stocks generally do go up, so buying and holding works equally as well with CFDs as it does with investing. The difference is when people get leveraged to the tits and margin called.
I’d argue the odds are in your favour with CFDs knowing that unless the company is a flaming trash heap, with time and patience, it will rise. Once I lost the opinion that CFDs were for day trading, and saw them as an opportunity for increasing my profits in trading, that was a game changer. I frequently hold CFDs for a few weeks. Why give up a winning trade?
Again, I think people lose money on CFDs because they either over leverage themselves, or they see their account in the red and panic sell.
I ‘invest’ in CFDs at a sensible level of cash and last time I did a count, 97 out of my last 100 trades were profitable. i.e. buy 5, maybe 10 CFDs at a time, not a crazy amount like 500. If the trade goes against you, theres really on harm in waiting a week or two for it to become profitable. CFDs don’t strictly have to be bought and sold daily.
Edit: must have been a bad streak, just had a look and 90 out of my 100 last trades were profitable. Funny thing was, 6 out of the 10 which weren’t, would have been profitable had I held 1 extra day instead of buying and selling on the same day.
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Yeah I guess in isolation the odds are 50/50: up or down. But strictly speaking there’s no fixed odds, it’s not like a roulette wheel where there’s and exact chance of an outcome. Depends on your scientific paradigm though. If you’re generally positivist, like myself, you’d actually believe there is set odds for each trade, and of course this makes sense, but if it was easy to figure them out everyone would be rich. I think trading is trying to use as much data as possible to figure out the odds. But as you say, put money in and leave it, odds are it will have went up.
I made my first dabble in CFDs, I shorted NKLA. Thought for sure there would be an insider sell off and the price would plummet. Never happened lol, actually went up. Oh well, was just a bit of fun