This was back last September when I'd recently opened an eToro account and had tentatively started investing. More innocent days. Since then I've stepped things up a bit, so it's probably a good time to do a little update.
I now have over £5000 invested ..and I'm currently about £400 down :|
This is mainly because I'm now quite heavily invested in, er, Russian stocks. In fact, they account for about 30% of my portfolio -- eep.
(don't look, it's bad)
Some of which I bought before Christmas, when I had no idea war was on the horizon. Others more recently, in the heat of the drama - I couldn't resist the opportunity to go against the herd.
It might be a hard lesson to learn, but at the same time I'm enjoying it all a little too much. True to form my interest in politics immediately trumped my focus on cash the minute things started getting dicey. In fact, I bought $10 more of Sberbank after the sanctions were announced and it dropped 75%, mainly because I want to see what'll happen. I got more shares for my $10 than I got for the other $50 that I'd bought just a few weeks earlier. It's either more good money after bad, or it'll bounce back up in some sort of glorious resurrection.
No doubt given the current situation it'll more likely be the former. Still though, again, I just couldn't resist the opportunity to get in for the ride.
I think I'll probably refrain from buying more stocks for the time being. This is probably a good point to let my bank account recover. I won't be selling anything though. So I'll just watch what happens.
To be fair the rest of my stocks are doing quite nicely. All the (non-Russian) miners I bought are doing fairly well. Plus I have a lot of safer stocks in the mix. So I'm happy with it overall.
I actually really like owning Evraz and Polymetal too. Obviously I have no idea what happens now. The politics are looking grim, plus I'm a total novice when it comes to investing. However, these seem like solid companies, politics aside. Meaning I'm quite happy to gamble on the hope that they won't be completely excommunicated from the western world.
