Buying some shares as 18th Birthday Gift

[Curlyshabtree]

A friend gave me the great idea to give DS some shares for his 18th birthday. It’s something he’s talked about.
However, I have no idea how to go about this and I will only have around £100 to invest.
Can anyone give me any advice? Thanks

£100 won't go very far - gains will be eatwn by fees, but if it's a way to encourage him to start investing and he'll then pay in more it's great to start young so they have lots of time to grow.

Not individual shares, go for a broad based fund to spread the risk. And in an ISA or pension so you/he don't need to do a crash course in tax.

First step is to choose a platform - Vanguard used to be the go to for beginners because it was simple, but it's now quite expensive if you don't have much in there. The key thing is a low fee.

Then decide on the wrapper (ISA or SIPP).

Then find a passive global tracker fund with a low fee. (Investing means paying platform fees, trading fees on sales and purchases, and fund management fees - you want to keep each of these as close to 0 as possible).

My advice is to involve your DS in all these stages so he starts to understand investing and really thinks about what he wants from the money, rather than just hand him the set up investment.

I would sit down with him and open a stocks and shares ISA on something like T212 as its fee free and great as a starter platform. Do some research with him on podcasts and YouTube. Put the £100 in for him and then let him choose the investment and add more when he has spare cash.

Are you wanting to buy the shares as a bit of fun for your DS birthday, and for him to start to learn about the basics? Or are you wanting to set up an account for him to invest more consistently over the longer term? If your DS is soon to turn 18 it is likely he will already have a Junior ISA or Child Trust Fund.

My dc already had a Junior ISA and a Junior SIPP set up for the 'serious' investing over the longer term in a diversified index fund.
For their 18th birthday, we opened an account on Trading 212. DC picked a single stock for investing half of their birthday money (in a tech stock they were interested in), and the other half they left alone to earn interest in Trading 212 qualifying money market fund. It seemed a useful way for them to track and compare the performance of both investments.

As it happened, their single stock investment was rather volatile over the first six months and lost some value, but in the second half of the year it shot up by over 80%. Meanwhile, as you would expect, the money market fund ambled along with a slow and steady return.