How to back test your portfolio for free

I have wanted to back test the performance of various portfolios for a while now.

One of the best sites I have found is https://www.portfoliovisualizer.com

You can go to https://www.portfoliovisualizer.com/backtest-portfolio to build and back test several portfolios.

My ETFs for H2 2025

We are now 6 months into 2025 and it is looking like Trump's devastating tariffs and his 'Big Beautiful Bill' is not going to be allowed to go ahead in it's entirety.

It may be that now is a good time to invest some spare cash that I may hold because it is looking like 'play time' will soon be over and the grown-ups will start to take charge of the USA soon.

Hot Tip: Crypto shares up 200+% in last month!

In the last month, the Bitcoin-oriented share ALTBG (Euro) has gained over 200% to date (11:00 BST 21-May-2025). They went up 168% in the last week!

This company has pledged to buy a large amount of BitCoin and seems to be rocketing. It often has a trading halt on it for a few hours but it is currently trading.

Warning: Marks & Spencer cyber hack - hackers now have all my customer details!

I received this email yesterday from M&S about the 'cyber incident' they suffered recently (although it seems they knew since Feb.2025!). 

It says that criminals have obtained my 'contact details, date of birth and online order history' and goes on to assure me that no usable card or payment details or passwords were obtained.

New Windows 10/11 AutoUnattend.xml generator

E2B, agFM and Ventoy allow you to use an unattend XML file with your Microsoft Window 10/11 ISO. This allows you to specify settings and components for your Windows install as well as semi- or fully-automate the install.

Previously, I have recommended the online Windows Answer File Generator (WAFG) but the site seems to no longer exist...

Legacy Boot with persistence of Kaspersky Rescue Disk ISO 2025 using E2B (grub4dos)

Here is how to get the KRD2025 ISO to legacy boot on E2B with user file persistence and with update file persistence.

1. Download the krd.iso file and save it to \_ISO\LINUX folder as KRD2025.iso.

2. Download the Ventoy pre-made 'backend' persistence files contained within the images.zip and extract ONE of the following persistence files as a .dat file using 7zip. I tried the 2gb one.

How I made 30% in one week from the current market chaos

It is possible to buy an ETN such as £3STP or €3STE which shorts TESLA shares.

The GraniteShares 3x Short Tesla Daily ETP seeks to track the Solactive Daily Leveraged 3x Short Tesla (-3x) index. The Solactive Daily Leveraged 3x Short Tesla (-3x) index tracks the three times leveraged inverse performance of the Tesla share on a daily basis.

The ETN's TER (total expense ratio) amounts to 0.99% p.a.. The ETN replicates the performance of the underlying index synthetically with a swap. The dividends in the ETN are accumulated and reinvested in the ETF.

The GraniteShares 3x Short Tesla Daily ETP is a small ETN with 18m GBP assets under management. The ETN was launched on 29 June 2020 and is domiciled in Ireland.

GraniteShares 3x short TESLA (Ticker 3STE) is an ETN that shorts TESLA by a negative factor of x3.

As long as I have some spare cash, then using a 'short' or 'inverse' fund allows me to hedge my portfolio but without selling any shares in my portfolio.

If you use Trading 212, use the Search page and look for 'Inverse ETFs' in the sidebar under the 'ETFs' heading.

This Euro sector ETF has gone up 30% in just 6 months!

Investors have secretly been moving away from S&P 500 stocks to Euro stocks. The past, excellent performance of the S&P 500 was mainly dependent on Tech stocks and due to recent events in AI and Elon Musk and his buddy DJT, etc. investors now think that Euro stocks have been undervalued in recent years.

Can I build a long-term Global ETF portfolio to rival the S&P 500?

The S&P 500 has historically shown very good and consistent gains, however the USA is proving to be quite a volatile market this year (2025) and so a more widely diversified portfolio would seem a sensible option.

However, investing in the whole global core market - e.g. Core MSCI World (ETF SWDA with 1,300 holdings) gives us diluted performance as it contains over 1000 stocks.

Now in my current portfolio, I have cherry-picked some S&P 500 stocks by using sector S&P 500 ETFs which have shown good performance and which I believe may continue to show good performance, such as:

• Tech - e.g. IITU or XLKQ
• Communications - e.g. IUCM
• Commodities - e.g. COMM
• Finance - e.g. IUFS
• Consumer - e.g. IUCD
• Utilities - e.g. IUSU

But what if I build a portfolio based on these sectors but using specially selected global market shares instead?

Easy2Boot 2.21 released

I uploaded a new version of E2B yesterday.

Very little has changed. The main thing was to test for the presence of wmic.exe in your Windows filesystem because new installations of Windows 11 will no longer have this once standard but now deprecated Windows utility.

Wmic.exe can be added into Windows 11 using the Optional Features option...

A new Windows 11 installation may not include the WMIC utility by default. See here

Add WMIC using: Windows 11 – Settings (Winkey+I) – Apps – Optional Features – View Features – WMIC – Install
A Windows restart/reboot my be required after installing WMIC.

Raindrops on roses... (a few of my favourite ETFs)

Raindrops on roses and whiskers on kittens 

Bright copper kettles and warm woolen mittens

Brown paper packages tied up with strings

These are a few of my favorite things [ETFs]

I do use a small part of my investment portfolio to buy individual company stocks like NVidia or Amazon or Tower Resources (big fail!), but as I am no expert in company analysis, I tend to only break even with these at the best of times! The problem is always when one stock dives significantly - I have learnt that slow and steady is better than risking any significant loss in just one stock as it takes ages to recover from that loss.

Index ETFs on the other hand will never go down to zero and usually tend to go up or at least keep pace with inflation.

The only exception is if I (stupidly) buy a very risky stock. In this case, I will buy it inside my GIA account so that if I make a loss, I can deduct that loss from my total gains and thus pay less CGT. If it makes a large gain, then I don't mind paying the CGT! On the other hand, if I held it inside my ISA and I lost 90% of it, I cannot even make use of that loss and it will take months to get that money back from my other investments. Trading outside of an ISA does sometimes have an advantage in that you can deduct that loss from your gains.

The ETFs I have listed below are my current favourites.

My ratio of holdings in these however will vary depending on the current stock market climate.

My favourite ETFs, ordered by fund size.

I tend to not sell ETFs such as SWDA, XDEQ, XLKQ, HMWS, CSP1 and EQQQ, and so I hold these in my SIPP and GIA accounts and don't sell them so as not to incur capital gains tax.

Tech stocks down today by 6% - here's what I am doing (27-Jan-2025)

The recent news that the latest open source release on GitHub of Chinese-based DeepSeek (equiv. to ChatGPT, OpenAI, etc.) is supposedly 95% cheaper than current US solutions using high-end nVidia chips.

Others are saying it gives a x30 performance improvement, taking much less time to teach it and less power to run it.

The stock market (S&P, Tech) is panicking as there certainly does seem to be some truth to the claims.

S&P 500 (2025-01-27)

Ventoy 1.1.00 is released today

At long last, a new version of Ventoy  (not 'Ventoy for Easy2Boot') has been released by LongPanda.

Ventoy 1.1.00 download

• 2025/01/22 --- 1.1.00 发布

1. Update to latest Shim (Fix verifying shim SBAT data failed) (#2947)
2. Support eweOS ISO (#3068)
3. Fix the boot issue of SystemRescue 11.02+ (#2958) (#3058)

Online calculator for UK Capital Gains Tax using www.cgtcalculator.com (examples for Interactive Investor and Trading 212)

I have a General Investment account with Interactive Investor, but I found it very painful to calculate my UK Capital Gains Tax liability on my Stocks and Shares sales.

Then someone on the ii forum suggested I try www.cgtcalculator.com and it seems to be pretty good. It seems to understand the same day rule, Section 104 rule and the 30-day rule.

If you don't know what the 30-day rule (bed-and-breakfast rule) is, then watch this video (see example 1) and here. Note selling shares of ABC on Trading 212 for instance, but then buying ABC a few days later on Interactive Investor also counts in the 30-day rule (AFAIK)! 

If you have several GIA accounts, you should combine all trades into one table (CSV, XLSX, etc.) first, before calculating gains/losses and CGT.

So here are my simple steps to calculate gains/losses for CGT purposes. I also include a Trading 212 example.

Use a PC/Notebook and the browser.

What is a 'safe' and simple investment stock portfolio for family and friends?

I am often asked by family and friends what they should invest in. This is an extremely difficult question because I don't want to be disowned by them if they lose their money!

Stock and Shares investment is a long term commitment. 

They can go up-diddly-up-up or down-diddly-down-down! 

Be prepared - in some years your investment pot may decrease a lot in value but don't sell!

If you can't stand to see your portfolio lose 20% in a year, then you could choose a nice safe savings account instead! However, savings accounts barely keep up with inflation. If you are a high rate tax payer and put £100K into a savings account paying 5%, then in the UK each year you will pay 40% of that 5K interest to the tax man! If cashing out after 5 years, due to loss of compounding and the tax difference, you will be about £5K better off with a 5% gain ETF even if in a taxable S&S account, than in a 5% savings account.

When investing in Stocks and Shares we must consider:

• Is an income required (Accumulating or Dividend portfolio)?
• Tax laws in your country of residence and using them to your best advantage
• Attitude to risk and loss (would you mind if your portfolio went down 40% in a year?)
• Do you need access to the money within a few years - e.g. to buy a house or car?

Try this free website for great Stock Market heat maps!

 Get todays heatmap!

At last, no more Trading 212 'scam' videos!

If you use Trading 212 to invest in Stocks and Shares or a Cash ISA, you may have noticed that the main screen can be very misleading and it is impossible to know if we have performed well or badly compared to other investors.

Here is an old screenshot which used to just show the total cost price of all the current shares in the portfolio and the gain on those current shares (e.g. current gain on £100k+ account is only £182). However, we do not know how much was deposited into the account in total or what the true return is. This account could have had total deposits of £100,000 for instance, and made various buys and sells over time. £8918 made over a period of 3 months is impressive, but over 5 years it is not so great! The gain of 0.17% does not sound impressive, but if the account had £100k made in deposits, it has actually made £8918 and if that was over a period of exactly one year, that is a 9% true gain (not 0.17%)!

What are the UK equivalents of the USA ETFs like VOO, SPY, VTI, VT, QQQ, VTV, SCHD, etc.?

ETFs like VOO (Vanguard S&P 500 ETF) and SCHD (Schwab U.S. Dividend Equity ETF) are not available on UK broker platforms such as Trading 212, Interactive Investor, etc.

You may have seen YouTube videos which recommend these ETFs.

Here are some equivalents which are usually available to UK and non-USA citizens.

Whole market Funds

VT & VTWAX

Debugging grub2 menus that won't fully boot (e.g. ArchLinux ISOs)

If you need to construct a grub2 menu, but then find that it does not work, you can add in some extra debug lines. For instance the grub2 read command will wait for you to press the RETURN key before continuing execution and an echo command can be used to track progress and view grub2 variable values.

Here is an example grub2 menu display output screen...

and here is the grub2 menu that was used...

menuentry "Arch Linux with Parameters" {

set iso_path="/_ISO/LINUX/archlinux-2024.12.01-x86_64.iso"

search --no-floppy -f --set=root $iso_path

probe -u $root --set=archiso_img_dev_uuid

loopback loop $iso_path

ls

echo

ls (loop)/

echo

ls /

echo

ls /_ISO/LINUX/

echo

echo archiso_img_dev_uuid=${archiso_img_dev_uuid}  iso_path=${iso_path}  root=${root} 

read

linux (loop)/arch/boot/x86_64/vmlinuz-linux archisobasedir=arch img_dev=UUID=${archiso_img_dev_uuid} img_loop=${iso_path}

initrd (loop)/arch/boot/x86_64/initramfs-linux.img

read

}

This menu sets iso_path to the path of the ISO file we wish to boot.