Amanda’s Trading Diary: Putting it into practice

Amanda Taylor, Master Investor’s CCO, documents her trading exploits this trading diary. This time, Amanda explains why she started trading and reveals her first investments. 

In my limited experience as an amateur investor, I’ve chosen mostly to buy funds because as a person who isn’t looking to trade full time, they feel like the lower maintenance option! But at the start of lockdown I decided to try to learn a bit about buying individual stocks and realised it was something I wanted to have a go at. I thought it would be a nice challenge and also a good way to learn about investing and most of all put into practice some of the stuff I have been learning in my role at MI.

A couple of weeks after lockdown began, I opened a new account and made a start. I’ll track what I buy in this diary along with my rationale for buying it and then we can see how they perform as time goes by.

To kick things off, here’s what I picked:

Carnival @ p894 (16/6/20 = p1361 up 51%)

I chose Carnival because it’s come up in conversation a few times. The cruise industry (and tourism as a whole) has been hit hard by the pandemic but I don’t feel like people will avoid travel forever. Also, with an ageing population I think cruises will become more popular, and perhaps they will with younger people too since the thought of being crammed into a plane breathing recycled air for several hours doesn’t feel that appealing!

Lloyds Banking Group @ p29.66 (16/6/20 = p32.84 up 10%)

Jim Mellon flagged this one as a dividend paying stock and I looked at their performance and at the time it looked they had dropped a bit so I thought I’d give it a punt. They were then forced to cancel their dividend which was a bit rubbish but given the circumstances I’m not too upset. Although I did see in the news yesterday that they’ve been fined and things have dropped a bit recently so maybe time to buy some more…

Royal Dutch Shell @ p1320 (16/6/20 = p1379 up 3%)

My partner was buying some and after having a chat about the research he’d done I decided it looked like a good opportunity. I started trying out using automatic limits for my buying with this one and managed to get what I think was a good deal.

HSBC @ p404 (16/6/20 = p383 down 5%)

For some reason this one flashed up on my news screen and when I looked at the chart it had dropped off massively, so I looked a bit closer and earlier in the year it had been around 600. My thinking was that I already had some Lloyds and like the idea of investing in banks rather than just saving my money in them, but it was a bit of an impulse buy. This might not have been my smartest choice as it’s consistently been my worst performer. Will do more research next time!

Walt Disney @ p820 (16/6/20 = p936 up 14%)

I’m a big Disney fan and after talking to a girlfriend who was also investing in Disney, we decided it was a strong opportunity particularly as they have more roll-outs of Disney plus on the way, and as lockdown eases and the parks reopen I’m hopeful the price will recover and grow nicely.

A friend used my code, so I got allocated a Tilray share @ 10.33 (16/6/20 p6.55 down 19%). It’s not been doing great but for a freebie it’ll be good to see if it picks up and does anything interesting. At the moment it’s mostly just screwing up my overall performance stats!

Performance at 16/6/20: Up 14% #winning