We are fortunate at Stockopedia to have a community of successful investors who have built portfolios worth more than £1m in their ISAs and kindly agreed to share their insights. In this series of articles we will explore their investment strategies and key lessons learned on how to pick stocks and manage risk when building a portfolio. Whether you are an experienced investor or just starting out, we hope that these interviews will provide valuable insights and inspire you to achieve your own investment goals.
Profile
Name: Geoff
Job: Recently retired from the National Grid
Number of years as a private investor: 40
Portfolio Size: Over £1m
Investing Background: Family knowledge encouraged Geoff to begin investing in unit trusts with the money he had available “which wasn’t very much”. He began investing directly in equities during the privatisation spree of the late 1980s and has been investing consistently since then, picking stocks for his portfolio on a case-by-case basis and reinvesting his dividends. He has recently retired with an impressive portfolio.
Investing Goals: Identify asset-light stocks
Getting Started
Geoff’s first foray into the stock markets was via the unit trusts given to him by family members. “That got me interested,” he says. Collective investment vehicles, including unit trusts, investment trusts, ETFs and funds are a good way for beginners without much time or capital to get started in investing in equities.
Then, in the late 1980s, Margaret Thatcher’s government began incentivising investment during the privatisation of British companies, so Geoff decided to start investing directly in equities. “Back then I didn’t have much to spend,” he said, but with his knowledge of the stock market from his family and his own portfolio of unit trusts, he had the confidence to take up the incentives of the privatisations.
Those companies (like British Telecom, British Petroleum and British Gas), were giants of British industry, with large reliable cash flows. Perhaps not with the growth capacity often sought by new, young investors, but dependable enough to not scare their new investors out of the market. For Geoff, the investments were “a good start and it built from there.”
Insight 1: Start investing early and use collective investment vehicles to get going if you need to build confidence.
Picking stocks
When Geoff…
