Blogs

Latest Blogs

The Courage to Act, or Not

Some of us have plenty of time to read good books while under lockdown rules. Here’s one I have been reading. It’s a memoir by Ben Bernanke, former Chairman of the Federal Reserve under the title “The Courage to Act”. It covers the major worldwide financial crisis of 2007/8 created by the defaults in sub-prime mortgages. The book includes a very good section on how that came about and how packaging up such mortgages eventually led to a complete lack of ...

Wellesley Investors Action Group

By Cliff Weight, Director, ShareSoc I encourage members to join the Wellesley Investors Action Group. You can do so here https://www.facebook.com/groups/wellesleyp2pcreditorsactiongroup Neil Taylor has brought this to my attention. ShareSoc is very willing to blog and tweet about this and encourage all those who have lost money in Wellesley to consider joining the Wellesley Investors Action Group. They have 300 members already which is a good start. But there were 11,700 investors affected, so ideally all should join the Action Group. The  336 ...

Information and Experience on Brokers and Platforms

One thing that all ShareSoc members depend upon is a good quality broker. With that in mind, we have started to create topics in our member forum. Our members can now use these to share any news or opinions and raise issues about individual brokerages. This will be helpful to other members. I have set up a separate “Topic” for each of the usual suspects in this area - https://www.sharesoc.org/forums/forum/choosing-a-stockbroker-or-platform/ Over time, I hope this will become a useful resource for members ...

Latest Woodford Press Coverage

Woodford continues to attract much press coverage and we have set up a Forum page for our members so that all those who are interested can quickly see all the latest news and can also access previous articles. The Forum link is https://www.sharesoc.org/forums/topic/latest-news/ If you visit this topic you can subscribe so that you can get an email when there is an update and/or a comment. This is done by clicking the "Subscribe" link at the top of the topic page. Also, if ...

A Review of my Portfolio in 2020

By Cliff Weight, ShareSoc Director Please note I am not qualified to give investment advice, and nothing in this blog constitutes advice. Overview Chris Spencer Phillips reported in a recent blog https://www.sharesoc.org/blog/investment-strategies/a-review-of-my-2020-share-portfolio-chris-spencer-phillips/ that his portfolio was up +80% in 2020, after being + 25% in 2019. Congrats and hats off to Chris. I cannot rival that, but I thought readers might find my review of 2020 of interest. My portfolio numbers for 2020 were: Everything – all equities, ISAs, SIPPs, OEICS, etc       ...