The last couple of days have been a roller coaster for the markets worldwide leaving us unsure of exactly where to try investing next. Instead we thought it better to take a look at the most popular funds and why investors prefer these choices.
Review
Juventus FC: After holding out in the hope of more news arising about the proposed European Super League, we finally decided to trade out with a small loss. The price hadn’t moved much ever since the breakaway failed, but we hoped that Real Madrid President Florentino Perez would continue to push his narrative about contracts being signed and binding. A 6.72% loss isn’t much and with no clear plan in mind to hold this stock it’s onwards and upwards for some new trades.Dogecoin: Adding to our cryptocurrency portfolio didn’t work out so well. We know that these holdings are generally volatile but we couldn’t have picked a worst week to jump on the dogecoin bandwagon.
After running a 16% profit during the first 24 hours we expected the price would wobble again after the initial jump and we were a few percent down for most of the week until a huge sell-off began leaving us in the red for over 23%. While bitcoin has proven to be resilient over time to holding value the alt coins are still somewhat of an unknown quantity. Ethereum is another prospect to analyse in the coming weeks but for now we’re sticking with just the single crypto coin.
Bitcoin: This has to be the quietest ever period for the world’s leading cryptocurrency. After being up by 1-2% for the last couple of weeks we are now down 1.6% but there is very little movement in the price. As discussed in earlier blogs we intend for this trade to be a long hold.
Marstons: Indoor drinking returns to the United Kingdom on Monday 17 giving hope that the nation’s leading breweries will finally start recovering from the pandemic. Our plan is still to take advantage of any increase over the next week or two and then close the trade.
Trading ETFs?
Exchange Traded Funds (ETFs) have many benefits for investors and short term traders. Fundamentally they are a basket of different stocks that tracks a variety of markets or sectors. For example, you can choose to invest in a globally focussed fund that tracks the world economy, or a single country. Sometimes an index tracker might be more appropriate, such as the S&P 500 or FTSE 100. There is plenty of choice to suit whatever investment strategy you are aiming for.
So why didn’t we jump straight into one of these funds this week? Well, if you saw the financial news over the last couple of days you would have seen panic starting to build over inflation fears in the US. The world’s largest economy is showing some bad signs giving markets all over the globe more than a slight wobble.
Bank of America said that this was purely seasonal. The S&P 500—an index made up of the 500 most valuable companies in the US—saw a 3% sell-of in the past week, marking concerns for the short term future. The Dow Jones and tech stock Nasdaq also saw considerable falls, along with the FTSE 100 in London.
It’s going to take more than a week or two until amateur investors will have a more clear idea of what to expect for the rest of the year. So for now we will research further for this week and see what the experts think.
