Investing

The coronavirus pandemic has had a drastic knock on effect on the global economy, with many still suffering. After the supposed first case was found in Wuhan, China in late 2019, the country swiftly went into a national lockdown until June. As China celebrates its New Year today, we look at how it, and its economy has fared one year on.

As any market-watcher knows, investment trusts have enjoyed a good run recently. Listed on the stock exchange and run by professional managers, investment trusts spread your money across dozens of different companies. The past year has seen a rush of interest in trusts - with some managing to double investors' money within a year.

It is 35 years since Margaret Thatcher revealed her dream of a society 'where owning shares is as common as having a car'. Yet despite dogged attempts by the finance industry to get people investing, little changed for decades. For years, car owners outnumbered those with an investment account by almost four to one. But that was until 2020. In the past year, hundreds of thousands of savers have tried their hand at investing for the first time.

The past year has been one of the toughest in living memory for businesses and many have suffered. But Britain's entrepreneurial spirit has also come into its own, as companies have adapted to coronavirus-induced restrictions and made the best of it. Many are now starting to surprise investors, with better than expected figures for the end of last year and beginning of this. Birmingham-based Headlam is one such business and the shares, at £3.90, should rise.

Choosing the right DIY platform is crucial but a wealth of choice and changes to charges have left many investors scratching their heads. We pick some of the best. We also highlight why investing in an Isa makes sense, as it should protect your hopefully growing investments from tax forever.

Getting something wrong is all part of trading and investing. And we shouldn't beat ourselves up about it. A loss, a bad decision, a failure to act, or any other form of mistake can be learned from and chalked up as the cost of investment education. I'm heavily exposed enough to the investing world to know the pitfalls - and yet over the years I've stumbled into plenty of blunders. Here are a few of them and what I've learned.

Other investors and I purchased investment bonds from Global Water Group Limited valued at nearly £900,000 in total. The company assured us they had been in business for six years with good returns, and that capital was fully protected by assets. Now the company is in liquidation, with no explanation of where our money has gone.

UK investors should be wary of 'highly volatile market conditions', the Financial Conduct Authority said, as small traders pump up the price of certain stocks. The FCA cautioned that traders joining the Reddit crowd in ploughing their money into GameStop and other stocks could even fall foul of rules on market abuse - if they were found to have artificially inflated the price of a stock.

After investors saw Scottish Mortgage double their money in a year, we speak to joint manager Tom Slater about that 12 months, the future and its big shareholdings. Simon Lambert asks about its high profile US and Chinese holdings, including what Tesla has to do to justify the valuation investors have put on it. And the trust's joint manager explains its continuing long-term investments in Tesla and Amazon - but sale of Facebook - as well as the potential growth it sees in Chinese electric carmaker Nio, healthcare, space, drones and delievery.

With a net worth of about £136bn, Elon Musk (pictured) is the richest man on the planet. It has been a dramatic rise for Musk, whose wealth rose more than five times last year. The Tesla founder is one of a new breed of tech billionaires who dominate the world's rich list. And as they have grown richer, so have the investors who backed them.

Like Bitcoin, currently with a market capitalisation of over £452.4billion, Ethereum is a decentralised currency, so it does not require a central bank or financial institution to issue it. Both use blockchain, the digital ledger technology where transactions are recorded and validated using a peer-to-peer network of computers rather than a single organisation.

A host of apps have brought the opportunity to buy and sell shares at no cost to the UK, but some also offer the chance to bet using high risk CFDs. Investors and people trading shares on a daily or weekly basis have been warned about this latter element. We explain what you need to know to tread carefully when looking for free share dealing.

Each month since August I have siphoned lockdown savings into the Isa I opened with a lump sum and seven investment trusts, adding different trusts and ETFs as I saw fit. Now some might call this a scattergun approach. And indeed for some tastes there are possibly too many holdings and too much overlap, and definitely too much technology - but it is an experimental portfolio that can be rebalanced over the years. This is how it's gone.

More people will be thinking of doing so, some inspired by the role they have played during the pandemic and others by a series of significant deals at the end of 2020. The automated future is arriving faster than we thought, disrupting business models and working practices. One indicator of how the process has accelerated has been the sight of robots spraying disinfectants in hospitals and cleaning floors and surfaces at St Pancras station in London.

Joe Biden is expected to provide much steadier leadership as a Covid-19 vaccine is rolled out and countries look to rebuild their economies and pay the massive bills run up during the pandemic. Here, investing experts give their take on how events and opportunities might unfold, with a green recovery on the cards but the risk of a clampdown on the tech giants looming in the US, Europe and China.

We asked you to send us your investment questions after we launched our beginner's guide to stocks and shares last month. From investing small amounts via lump sum deposits or regular contributions to learning what happens if an investment platform goes out of business, here we ask the experts what you want to know.

I made my first foray into the stock market at the age of 25 in November 1984 when cut-price BT shares were sold to small investors. The profits helped to pay for a skiing holiday and whet my appetite for investing. A few years later, as a self-employed freelancer, I began saving into a personal pension, then came my first Pep (a forerunner of Isas), Perpetual's Growth & Income fund, in 1989.

Is your new decade resolution to get rich - or richer, at least - and are you ready to do some serious saving to reach your goal? Find out how much you need to put away each month to hit a £10,000, £100,000 or £1million savings target by 2030, and the best way to get started if you are new to investing.

Investing through funds and trusts gets you diversification, and gives you exposure to many asset classes, markets and strategies. But how do you distribute your savings across them, to build a portfolio that's spread widely enough to mitigate risk and achieve your goals - while dodging rookie traps like duplication or simply holding too much to comfortably manage.

Investment fund names are often a baffling mixture of impressive but vague words, which mean little to people who aren't already clued up on financial jargon. People hoping to boost their savings by buying a fund or trust face a steep learning curve, unless they're lucky enough to have a friend in the know or are willing to fork out fees to a financial adviser. We offer a short cut, and explain what all the fancy terms really mean.

The company is scheduled to float on the stock exchange next month at a price of £1 a share and expects to deliver at least 9 per cent returns per year, through dividends and capital growth. Cordiant hopes to raise between £300million and £500 million to buy masts, data centres and fibre optic cabling in the UK, Europe and US. Boss Steven Marshall is already in advanced negotiations on three assets worth hundreds of millions of pounds and has identified a pipeline valued at nearly £1.5billion. Initial deals are likely to take place in Europe and the US, but British assets will follow in time.