DJT down again today to $42 from a high a few days ago of $79. Came across this gem of a comment on the reddit discussion:
Yes – basically everyone knows this is a grifty dogshit “social media” company with single-location carwash revenues- so everyone is really just betting the margins on how dogshit a company it is, or more precisely, when will we recognize that fact and how low will it go? I’d say it’s going to $0, but it could easily take 5+ years to get there. This is like trying to value TSLA on its fundamentals vs the aura of Elon- except it’s to the next degree of magnitude. There are more than zero people out there putting their life savings into DJT purely because they love Trump that much. I feel bad for them, to a point. I feel worse for their kids.

DJT stock down 24% today. Company saying it may not be able to meet its liabilities.

“He gets back before the females arrive so he can tidy the nest up and its believed a well presented nest (good diy skills) make females more likely to stop.”

Yes, LJ2 has been a busy boy today and if you ‘rewind’ on my original post you can see the progress he’s made.

Borough Market is usually closed Mondays, not sure about BH though.

Casa de Frango at London Bridge is nice. Think posh Nandos in a cool location but not silly expensive.

“Then I’ll be half an hour late!”

I can just picture Ronnie Corbett sat in his chair telling that one.

Another vote for gpx studio. Used it this week to trim a route by drawing a rectangle then delete waypoints within the rectangle.

Brenig is a great little spot in N Wales that rarely gets busy and has loads to do. Some nice gravel rides around the 2 lakes which you can get the gpx from on the main site as well as water sports and fishing. And of course you can watch the Ospreys from the RSPB station. Well worth a visit if you are in that part of the world https://llynbrenig.com/reservoir-visitor-centre/

BTC ETFs are not available in the UK. Microstrategy (MSTR) are a US software company with a Ex-CEO now President who is a BTC evangelist – “MicroStrategy now holds approximately 214,246 BTC (worth $13.5 billion at current prices), which is more than 1% of all the 21 million bitcoin that will ever exist. It has paid approximately $7.53 billion for its BTC stash, an average of $35,160 per coin, according to the filing.”

So I imagine MSTR stock is closely pegged to BTC but ICBA to check so maybe buy MSTR?

20% off everything Karcher from today via MoneySavingExpert https://www.moneysavingexpert.com/deals/karcher/

Autoglym seems to have the same reputation in the detailing world as Muc-Off does in the biking world.

Although I’m retired I do like following a business development guy on TikTok “Dave Solomon Solutions Store’. He offers a £5 per month Business Club as well as 121 mentoring but much of his content is free. Check it out and it may give you some ideas e.g. a recent video is titled ‘would YOU buy from YOU?’

“hmmmm, it’s a little bit cleaner but I’m not sure if that’s because of the snowfoam or because I’ve given it the once over with the jetwash.”

Snowfoam should be applied to a dry car rather than prewash with the jetwash.

PS Where have the markup options gone?

Selling my Liebherr R 9800 (42100) for £250 plus P&P (or can drop off local to West Cheshire). Bought it from neilforrow of this parish back on page 27 of this thread and it’s been sitting on the study floor since then. Mrs S has said time to move it on. Message me if interested.

How long before we have a Marjorie Taylor Greene thread? She’s proper Upton Park.

Most of the crashes are at Druids ;-) and you can often see some of the lesser cars lifting a wheel which is quite cool. I haven’t been to a big event for a number of years but often go down during the week to watch the practice sessions and take some pics as it’s free to get in. Just look at the course map and you will be fine.

Started watching Turning Point: The Bomb and the Cold War on Netflix – “The series chronicles the creation of the atomic bomb and the spread of nuclear arms over the following decades. It continues past the dissolution of the Soviet Union to Vladimir Putin’s ascent and the Russian invasion of Ukraine.”

2 episodes in and very good so far.

Well the first thing I would look at doing is transferring them all onto the same platform and if that makes sense use the Morning Star X-Ray portfolio analysis which I find pretty good. If you move to Interactive Investor you can do Morning Star X-Ray directly against your SIPP account.

I wish I could follow my own advice, but it really is just best to fire & forget, ride the market & leave well alone. We really aren’t emotionally suited to this though.

Agree that fire and forget is good up to a point and I check every 4-6 months to see if I need to rebalance.

That leaves you with VWRL – but that’s overweight the magnificent 7, which any fule now are all about to crash, er, magnificently.

Which is what I’m concerned about at the moment so I’m looking at moving some of my S&P 500 ETF to a similar one that has equal weighting i.e. 0.2% in each company.

Micheal Edwards heading back to FSG/Liverpool with Richard Hughes expected to be sporting director, Eddie Howe’s mate from Bournemouth days, makes you think 🤔

Great interview with Micheal Edwards on the TalkSport YouTube channel. He’s got quite an interesting back story having got an offer to coach football in America from his PE teaching role in Llangollen. He then moved into the corporate sector and held senior roles at Reebok, SEGA and EA Sports before coming back for his first stint at Liverpool.

We did the Coniston boat trip on Thursday and got all the Bluebird details from the commentary. If you start the boat trip from the Coniston pier the boat stops on the other side of the lake where you can take a short walk to the Ruskin museum to see Bluebird from March 19th.

As noted above hearing aids are optimised for speech not music so I’ve drifted towards podcasts.

30 mbps download is fine for us but I find the 5 mbps upload a pain for backing up my photography hobby to the cloud and when backup is running it means we can’t stream. Easily enough to fix by scheduling overnight backup so only a mild annoyance.

The corridor between West Germany and Berlin also extended to airspace. I visited in 1985 and on the flight the pilot announced we would be descending to 10,000 feet to fly through the airspace corridor. And only 3 western airlines were allowed to fly in – BA, PanAM, Air France but not Lufthansa.

Who specifically do you have in mind? Just wishing for someone young and popular isn’t helpful if that person doesn’t exist.

I keep seeing Michelle Obama being mentioned in this context but Politico sum it up nicely:

“It’d certainly be interesting if Joe Biden were about to be swapped out for Michelle Obama in a premeditated plan to wrongfoot Republicans and coast to victory. In reality, Democrats, figuratively and literally, are stumbling ahead with the guy they’ve got.”

Cancelled on Friday and received a £74 refund from my yearly sub which I paid in November. Ordered something yesterday which was due to be delivered free to my local locker (200 yards away) tomorrow, but currently showing ‘out for delivery’ so not really a difference.

The potential downside to a global tracker is that ~70% will be in US equities and ~18% in the ‘Magnificent 7’. So a correction in the US plus a strong $ versus £ will have a big impact. Don’t get me wrong, I have a global tracker as a core holding but also have additional trackers in other regions including the UK

@retrorick check out the Loop app as this will do all of what you need plus more. You could also try asking Octopus for n In Home Display (IHD)

Nothing for me with a 30k pot

ditto

hitting the higher rate tax band if you need to withdraw a big sum for any event.

The ISA route is one way of doing it but you could also just take a big chunk of your remaining 25% tax free allowance in an emergency. BTW you can crystalise and drawdown £67k in the current tax year without paying 40% tax.
Edit: As long as that is your only source of income

MAGA nutters now claiming Alina Habba is a Deep State plant deliberately doing a s*** job for her client.

So, I’m moving stuff over to EFTs but I’ve just realized there are so many different types of EFT and no idea which one(s) to choose.

Are you sure you wouldn’t be better off with the low cost lifestyle funds if you can’t decide what to invest in?

Whilst talking about bonds and annuities, what’s the hive thoughts about any potential fall out from the US Presidential election in November? Are you likely adjust your investments before any potential chaos and spill over?

Perhaps one of the IFAs that are lurking on this thread may want to answer :-) We all know what a helpful place this is with people chipping in with their own area of expertise when asked.

Isn’t that the issue with these life-styling options. Have just been looking at my wife’s pension and it is heavily exposed to bonds, the bond units have lost 37% over the last 2 years or so. As you would expect, this has dragged the whole pot down. Exacerbated by them charging too much in fees for ‘managing’ it.

Just as a comparison the Vanguard Lifestrategy 40% fund which has 40% Equities and 60% Bonds was down 13.61% in 2022 but up 8.45% in 2023. So yes, the bond market did take a hit in 2022 but previous years and this year have more than made up.

I couldn’t possibly have dealt with it myself, I have no understanding of what’s involved, and if I’d followed some people’s advice and just gone onto one of those online pension things, I reckon I’d have ended up with very little.

And this is what the financial companies and IFAs thrive on. The thing is, with the amount of online content available these days there’s any number of ways to educate yourself on this subject, or, you take the alternative of having your pants pulled down by an IFA.

lol. Back on topic the white port with tonic shout on the previous page is a great sunshine drink.

Only 2 reds on that label, you on a health kick binners?

The Manhattan T3-R has a much less cluttered UI than the Humax according to reviews.  We’ve got one and like it.

Just researching a holiday in Canada and liked the look of the Rocky Mountaineer train from Jasper to Vancouver, but at £3k for the two of us I think I’ll pass and you don’t even get to sleep on the train.  Via Rail do the same route at a fraction of the cost so going with them.

I agree that Fargo series 5 is a welcome return to form with a great plot and an ending that doesn’t disappoint.  Still find it weird the main character is played by Keeley from Ted Lasso, but what a great actress Juno Temple is.

on the radio this morning, David Davies was saying that the heart of the prosecution evidence was on the basis that the only people that could access Horizon were the postmasters themselves therefore and changes / financial adjustments or whatever HAD to be the PM’s own work.

That was accepted at the time, now discredited so you can’t say with any certainty that the PM’s did it.

Been doing a bit more digging and one thing that strikes me is the PM’s defence didn’t do a great job of discrediting/questioning the Horizon system.  For example, did they ask for a list of bugs/change requests that had occurred?  The Dalmellington Bug entailed a user repeatedly hitting a key when the system froze as she was trying to acknowledge receipt of a consignment of £8,000 in cash. Unknown to her each time she struck the key she accepted responsibility for a further £8,000. The bug created a discrepancy of £24,000 for which she was held responsible.

And also asking who had admin rights on the Horizon system that would allow them to make changes to the underlying data.  As far back as 2011 the SSC (support team) had APPSUP permissions on more than the intended basis which was supposed to be in extreme circumstances only and temporarily.

This guy has written extensively about the IT and auditing side of things:

https://clarotesting.wordpress.com/the-post-office-horizon-it-scandal/