I recently closed my position in TSMC after gradually building it through several purchases.
My TSMC Purchases
£305 invested when TSMC was trading at $398
£126.14 invested at $413
£60 invested at $403
Total invested: £491.14
Taking Profit
I decided to sell my entire position when TSMC reached $441.22.
The result:
💰 Profit: £47.35 📈 Return: 9.64%
A solid gain and a successful trade overall.
The Stock Kept Climbing
Since selling, TSMC has continued to move higher and is now trading at $462.29.
Had I held my position, my figures would look like this:
💰 Potential Profit: £73.08 📈 Return: 14.88%
That’s an additional £25.73 compared to what I actually realised.
My Takeaway
It’s always tempting to focus on the extra profit you could have made, but hindsight is perfect. When I sold, I had locked in nearly a 10% gain, and there was no guarantee the stock would continue higher.
In investing, taking profits is never a bad outcome.
Trade Summary
Metric
Amount
Stock
TSMC
Total Invested
£491.14
Sell Price
$441.22
Realised Profit
£47.35
Return
9.64%
Current Price
$462.29
Potential Profit If Held
£73.08
Additional Profit Missed
£25.73
Overall, I’m happy with the trade. A profitable trade is a good trade, even if the stock continues to run afterwards.
An important part of what a Stocks ISA or a Stocks and Shares ISA is that it’s a government backed account. ISA stands for Individual Savings Account, it’s not the same as a normal savings or investment account.
What is the difference between a regular savings or investment account and an ISA?
The difference is that interest is tax free, investment gains are tax free and dividends are tax free. With a Stocks ISA, any gains you make from this account is tax free. It’s a very powerful tool that will make you, essentialls free money. Not many countries have this opportunity.
If you open a regular account and invest in stocks and shares, technically your profits and dividends are taxable.
Do I have to pay tax on regular stocks and shares that I buy?
The short answer is yes, if you buy a stock or share in a company and you make a profit you will have to pay capital gains tax. Below are come clear cut rules:
You only pay tax on gains that are over £3000 annually.
If your gains exceed £3000, basic rate taxpayers pay 18% on shares, while higher/additional rate taxpayers pay 24%.
Meaning if you earn £50,270+ from your job (self employed or employed) you’ll be on the higher tax bracket of 24% on your gains. Between £12,571 and £50,270 you pay 18% on gains.
If you are on the lower rate and earn £10k profits in stocks and shares you’ll have to pay £1,260 tax. Because £10,000 – £3000 tax free allowance, you are taxed at 18% on the remaining £7000.
Tax is only paid on the profit (selling price minus purchase price).
You don’t pay tax on profits when you use a Stocks and Shares ISAwhich is why it’s worth getting one.
Should I get a Stocks and Shares ISA?
It’s completely up to you if you want one but I highly recommend it. You can invest up to £20,000 a year, and any profits you make from that £20,000 is compeletly tax free.
Here you can see I’ve put in £2000 and I have £18,000 remaining this year to invest.
In theory, if your investment goes to £40,000, you get £20,000 completely tax free. That’s basically free money! You don’t even need to declare you’ve made that money, it’s almost the only way you can earn money without getting tax on it in the UK.
You can choose what you invest in, and many apps like Trading 212 make it very easy and clear on how to do it.
The screenshot below shows the fund that I invested in called “BlackRock Core”. It’s a collection of ETFs in various different places. I chose this one based on its past performance and diversity of shares.
As you can see, in the past year it got a return of 13.03%, in the past 3 years it’s gone up by 10.73%.
There are various “pies” that you can invest in, from one called “Almost Daily Dividends” to AI Stocks to “The Compounding Investor Pie”. I highly recommend you have a look through these and make your own choices, make sure you look at how many people are copying, as well as there returns. Remember just because lots of people are copying, doesnt mean it’s a good investment.
With the recent rise is Nvidia and AI technology it’s pretty safe to say that they’re both here to stay. Nvidia saw gains of 80x in the last 10 years so we’re on the look out to find the next big winner.
GPUs power many datacenters around the world, but who actually makes the GPUs? TSMC manufactures the chips behind Nvidia, Apple and AMD, this is the a fundamentle company that is behind all of the businesses.
Around 70% of the worlds of the worlds advanced chips are made by TSMC, “Annual capacity of the manufacturing facilities managed by TSMC and its subsidiaries exceeded 17 million 12-inch equivalent wafers in 2025” – TSMC website.
If TSMC stopped maknufacturing AI would grind to a halt almost instantly.
Who else is investing?
Philippe Laffont is a French hedge fund manager worth over $7.9 billion. He has recently stated $2.62 Billion on TSMC. Once Taiwan eased limitations on the stock, it jumped 123% as investors wanted more.
2 of the biggest companies in the world Nvidia and Apple heavily rely on TSMC, will the stock go up as much 80x, I’m not sure, but it’s definatly worth the risk.
As of 1st of May 2026, I invested over £300 in the stock, let’s see how it does!
Nvidia is a technology companty based in Califonia, USA. They are mostly known for making graphics cards but recently they have been all over the news for their work in AI, which is the stock has shot up in recent years.
As of writing this post Nvidia is at an all time high of 200.11, it’s the highest valued stock in the entire world with a market cap of £3.565 T. The top tree stocks are Google (Alphabet) with a market cap of £3.367 T and Apple with a market cap of £3.084 T.
Of 10,813 companies with a total market cap of £106.067 T. Nvidia alone makes up 3.36% of the entire market. It hit this positions in June 2024 but it has gone up and down since.
Where was Nvidia 10 years ago?
Compared to 10 years ago Nvidia has sky rocketed up. In 2016 it was only $2.50–$3.00 per share, now they are around $180 – $200 per share, this is around 80x increase.
If you invested £1000 in Nvidia 10 years ago you would now have between £65k to £75k. Even if you invested £1000 5 years ago would now have around £11k.
Why did the stock go up so much?
It’s a mixture of things really, there timing was perfect but it could be argured that it was completely accidental. Nvidia is a company that makes GPUs (graphics card processors), these are normally made for gaming and sometimes other high processing computations used in science, but more crucially AI.
It just so happened that AI technology came about recently and AI requires lots of processing power, GPUs are perfect for this. They didnt have to move towards technology for AI because they already had it, so they were ahead before anyone else.
They also made some software called CUDA which allows other software to use NVIDIA GPUs for general-purpose computing.
Real money is no longer in gaming, its in datacenters for cloud computing, AI and big tech companies like Meta, OpenAI etc. All of these datacenters need GPUs. As demand for these GPUs went up Nvidia is able to charge more, for example there H100 / B100 GPUs sell for $20k–$40k+ each. You can read more about the H100 here.
Nvidia H100 GPU
The bottom line is that Nvidia is no longer a “gaming chip” company, but the company that powers AI.
Is Nvidia still a good stock to buy?
Although it’s impossible to say with 100% certaintly, it seems Nvidia is still going up, AI is only going to get more popular and useful. Unless a bigger player comes along it will continue to go up. In the long run I have no doubt it’ll be a good investment just like any of the other top 100 companies.
Although there are other companies that do what Nvidia does many are not at the same level. Intel, AMD, Google, Amazon, Apple, all create GPUs and infractructure in AI but Nvidia is still the top player.
Huawei, a Chinese company is a potential threat to them in the long run as they have backing from the Chinese government and it’s already replacing some of Nvidia in some datacenters in China. It’s worth looking into foreign companies in the long run as they can often produce cheaper alternatives, but many are still a long way behind.
The short answer is no, I don’t think so. Of course this is just my opinion, it’s a good way to lose a lot of money, I’ve tried it and I lost a lot of money.
What is day trading?
Day trading is when you buy and sell stock or shares in the short term, often the same trading day. Often traders trade very high volitile stocks at high prices to get quick profits. Many day traders make lots of small trades due to the fast paced nature.
Its easier than ever to get into day trading which makes it very risky. Platforms like IG, EToro, Trading 212 and many more, make it easy to do this.
Day trading is legal, and anyone can do it (as long as you are over 18).
Often day traders trade very highly volatile stocks becasue they rise and fall so quickly meaning you can make lots of money very quickly but also lose it.
Can you make lots of money day trading?
Yes, it’s possible to day trade and make thousands in a matter of seconds. But also lose it, many consider it gambling because you simply cannot know the outcome.
I tried my hand at day trading a few years ago and I made a lot of money and lost of a lot of money, often in the same day and even the same hour.
My most profitable day made me over £2000. My worst day I lost over £6000. It’s the most anxious I’ve ever felt and I had to stop for my own health. I did it for over a year and I think in the end I probably only really made a couple of hundred pounds whilst losing many days to stress taking away from my real business. I regret it but also it was a learning experience that I was probably always going to try!
Belows shows the highs and (mostly) lows of day trading when I was doing it regularly. As you can see I was very bad at it, I wouuld after just buy more of a losing stock instead of just taking the loss, hoping it would go back up. Don’t do what I did! £2,281 in one trade!!
What types of stocks/share do people day trade?
Many people trade in high-liquidity, volatile tech and growth stocks at the moment (April 2026), stocks like:
Nvidia (NVDA)
Tesla (TSLA)
Apple (AAPL)
Amazon (AMZN).
These stocks have high price swings, and are often driven by news in AI, semiconductors, and electric vehicles.
People have also recently been trading in Gold and Silver, these are popular because they are very dependant on news events like US interest rates and Geopolitics.
If you really want to give it a go, I would highly recommend not using your own money at first, use a demo account on your platform of choice and see if you can make money on that.
Trading 212 have a demo account available to anyone that uses real market data.
Use a Prop Firm
I’m not really a believer in Prop Firms but its a way of day trading without using your own money so the only risk is the fee to get on their platform.
Please make sure you do your own research before putting your money anywhere, this is not advice but information from my own experiences.
In recent years investing has become much more mainstream due to the availability of investing apps. Anyone can download an app and start investing, but where should you start and what should you invest in?
What is investing?
Investing is simply putting your money somewhere with the hope that it’ll go up in value.
For example if you bought a gold bar for £100, in 6 months time that same gold bar might be worth £150, meaning you have made £50. You can do the same with stocks/shares in a business.
Why not just put my money in the bank?
Most banks will offer around 2% or 3%, these will be for easy access bank accounts where you can easily add and withdraw money.
This means that you will gain (for example) 3% interest per year. If you have £1000 in the bank, they will give £30 just for having your money in there bank.
Some banks offer interest rates of around 3% – 3.5%. Others above 4%, I’ve seen some offer around 7% but money of these require you to keep your money in the bank for at least a year and you can’t withdraw it.
All banks will use this number to change there interest rates, it will affect mortages, loans, and other things money related.
You could put your money in the bank and get a guarenteed 3 or 5 or even 7% each year but the stock market can earn you more money.
If you was to invest in the S&P 500 which is the top 500 companies in the world, you can expect a return of around 10-11% (Source IG.com).
Average returns per year for the S&P 500
If you was to invest in the S&P 500 you could lose money, but historically it always goes up. In the last 20 years its gone up 679.1% in the last 10 years its gone up 272.2%, in the last 5 years its gone up by 80.2%. (Source https://curvo.eu/backtest/en/market-index/sp-500?currency=eur)
Meaning if you invested £1000 20 years ago in the S&P 500 you would now have £7,791.
So it makes more sense to invest your money, or at least some of it in the stock market to beat the banks interest rates.
Period
Average annualised return
Total return
Last year
10.8%
10.8%
Last 5 years
12.5%
80.2%
Last 10 years
14.0%
272.2%
Last 20 years
10.8%
679.1%
Where should I start investing?
There’s lots of routes you can go with this. I would advise picking one app and sticking with it for a while.
Everything I write below is my opinion and you should 100% do you own research.
This is a good place to start, they make it easy to set up and account and start investing. When you start make sure you pick the option “Invest” rather than CFD, you don’t want to get into the realm of Day Trading. We’ll cover this at a later date.
There’s fees are very low and often zero and you can invest in a large number of things including commodities like gold, as well as stocks like Apple or Intel as well as ETFs like Vanguard S&P 500.
If you ask me, the safest investment you can make is an ETF, which is basically lots of stocks put into one investment, the S&P 500 is one of them. You’ll often them see them called something like “Vanguard S&P 500” which just means Vanguard manages this ETF.
You are welcome to invest in actual companies, but only do this if you are ok with potential losing your money.
This is another easy to use investing app, you can set up a one off payment or a monthly payment and then set up the “risk”, the higher the risk the higher the potential reward as well as the risk of losing money.
A great thing about this app is that you can choose the “theme” of investment like “ethical” or “orginal”. With this app you can kind of stay away from having to make any decisions and they do the rest for you.
This shows my investments, I chose “Ethical” but the “Original” Plan has better returns!
Similar to Trading 212, you sign up and pick the stocks you want to invest in. They have kind of turned this platform into a social media for investing, stocks have a feed of people commenting on this and you can “copy traders” investment to make things easier.
A great platform that is a bit more aimed towards more experienced investors but you can definatly make this your first investment app.
Very easy to use and keep track of your investments. I tested out this platform recently by putting £2000 into the Vanguard S&P 500, it went up by £130, then I withdrew my funds of £2130. It was a great little bit of income from doing nothing really. No fees.
I’ve mentioned these a few times, they have their own platform and App where you can invest in various funds. I’ve used them for a number of years and I’ve made a good amount of profit from my investments.
Summarising Starting Investing
I havent gone into too much detail here but those are the platforms that I have personally used. I’ll go into much more detail in later posts.
To summarise, you should really look into investing any spare money in the stock market in some way, as it’s a good way to earn more money without really having to do anything. Of course you can very easily lose money so be careful when you invest in anyway.
Here goes, I’m starting this blog on the 28th of April 2026, it’s been a long time coming and I’ve always wanted to start this but the timing has never seemed right.
The goal of this blog is to give advice to anyone looking to start investing or wants to be more involved in the space.
What gives me the right to give advice? Nothing, but I have been investing for over a decade now and have made tens of thousands of pounds just from putting my money in the right place at the right time.
I’ve made some big mistakes and crazy decisions, I’ve learnt from them and now I think I have a good understanding of how to reliably beat the banks offering stupid rates.
Follow along if you are wanting to get the lastest info and insights.
