Category
Because prices reflect expectations already, so what moves them is the gap between what happened and what was anticipated — not the news itself. This single idea explains most of the behaviour that
Client assets are supposed to be held separately from the platform's own, so a failure is an administrative problem rather than a loss — and the protections are real, with specific limits worth
Advice is a personal recommendation about what you should do, is regulated, and carries a right of redress if it is unsuitable. Guidance is information and options without a recommendation, is far
Leveraged products that let you bet on price movements without owning the underlying asset. They are heavily advertised, and regulators require providers to publish the proportion of retail accounts
A number summarising the value of a defined group of shares, used as a benchmark for how a market is doing. How it is constructed matters far more than most people realise, because different
A tax charged at every stage of production, where each business pays tax on the value it adds and reclaims what it paid its suppliers — so the full burden lands on the final consumer while being
By pricing a fixed basket of goods and services repeatedly and tracking how much it costs over time. The apparent simplicity hides a series of judgement calls, each of which materially affects the
Betting that a price will fall, by selling something you do not own — borrowing it, selling it, and hoping to buy it back cheaper before returning it. It is one of the least understood activities in
An initial public offering is the first sale of a company's shares to the public, turning a private company into a listed one. It is as much a liquidity event for existing owners as a fundraising,
Your order is matched against a seller somewhere in a market you never see, and the ownership record changes days later — a chain of steps that explains several things investors find puzzling. The
An account held by two or more people with equal rights over the whole balance — and that phrase is doing more work than most holders realise, because each person can generally withdraw everything
Investing that considers environmental, social and governance factors alongside financial ones — and the honest assessment is that it does something, that the something is frequently not what
By separating three different things that get conflated — how much risk you need to take, how much you can afford to take, and how much you can emotionally tolerate — because the lowest of the three
An investment trust is a company whose shares you buy; an open-ended fund creates and cancels units on demand. That structural difference produces several consequences that matter considerably more
A mortgage linked to savings accounts, where the savings balance is deducted from the mortgage balance before interest is calculated — so you earn no interest on the savings and instead pay no
Anyone whose income is not fully taxed at source or whose circumstances fall into defined categories — and the obligation is yours to identify, which is the part that catches people out. Nobody
An arrangement where you give up part of your contractual salary in exchange for a non-cash benefit — most commonly pension contributions — and the benefit comes from the fact that the sacrificed
Through a tracing service and your own records — and it is worth doing, because a very large number of pension pots are lost, with billions of pounds sitting unclaimed in schemes whose members have
It is funded by National Insurance contributions, paid at a flat rate to those who qualify, and the amount you receive depends on your contribution record rather than on what you earned — which is
Who carries the risk. In a defined benefit scheme the employer promises an income and bears the investment and longevity risk. In a defined contribution scheme you build a pot, and all of that risk
A guaranteed, automated process that moves everything within a set number of working days — and despite being reliable and frequently paying a cash incentive, switching rates remain strikingly low,
A government-backed savings product that pays no interest at all. Instead, each £1 bond is entered into a monthly prize draw, and the return you receive is whatever you happen to win — which for most
Accounts are frozen, the estate is gathered and debts paid, and only then is anything distributed — a sequence that takes months and creates real practical difficulty for the people left behind. What
Investing a fixed amount at regular intervals rather than a single lump sum, so you buy more units when prices are low and fewer when they are high. It is genuinely useful — for reasons that are