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.
