Does anyone know anything about shares?

[Crimebusterofthesea]

Basically, this week DP found out that he had £2500 in a savings account that we both had completely forgotten about - I still can't quite get my head around it, it's ridiculous! Anyway, I have transferred this money into an ISA but I've been thinking about ways in which we could potentially get a bit more out of it. Doe anyone have any experience of investing in shares? Where do I start? Who should I look to buy shares in? Any starting points would be very much appreciated.

Crikey, if you don't know anything about the stock market, it's a bit of a minefield & no guarantees of a return so you could lose your money.

However there are tracker unit trusts where you'll invest in a managed fund that should give you a slightly better return than interest rates, although there are annual management charges & dealing charges so you'd probably have to be ptepared to lock it away for some time.

I'm no expert, you'd need to do a fair bit of research & tbh if you don't have any emergency savings already that might be a better place to start.

Good luck

I don't think I would take the chance of shares with £2,500 to invest. I think you are better of sticking with an ISA. But there are some ISA's which do invest in the stockmarket. I don't know much about them and stick to the ordinary ones but you could look into this.

Best advice I was given on shares was 'only invest what you can afford to lose'... Rather like a day at the races! Shares can (and do) go down as well as up so forget short-term killings but think about locking the money away for 5 - 10 years so that any ups and downs have chance to level off. Even then you might walk away with less than you started.

There are many institutions offering 'managed funds' where - for a fee -the investment is spread across a particular sector and actively managed. Sometimes these are offered as Stocks and Shares ISAs. IME this is less scary than choosing individual companies in which to invest... but they can still go down as well as up. I've had several managed funds in place for 10+ years. All of them lost up to 50% in value in 2008 during the crash but some have steadily climbed back up since and others have never recovered.

If you want a guaranteed return, no risk, and don't need the money immediately then fixed term bonds might perform a little better than Cash ISAs. Worth shopping around.