Hey guys it's sasha today, i want to talk about some really interesting tricks and secrets that can make a huge difference to your investing returns. These investing tricks won't be the typical things that everyone talks about. Don't worry. I won't tell you that you need to buy low and sell high.

I will start with some more basic tricks and work up to some more sophisticated ways to improve your investing strategy later on in this video. So, let's get cracking first up. Let's talk about tax loss harvesting, this will work slightly differently depending on where you live, so your local laws might be different to some somebody else's and you need to do a bit of research, but in general it kind of applies everywhere. Now, in the us taxes work on a calendar year from the 1st of january to the 31st of december and in the uk, the tax year runs from the 6th of april to the 5th of april the following year.

So we're coming up to both of these soon this might be important and the rules around tax loss harvesting are a little bit different between different jurisdictions. So i'm not going to go into the depths here, but pretty much wherever you do live. You can save yourself money by cashing in losing positions. Any gains you make in an investing year are taxed as capital gains short-term gains in the u.s taxed as income yeah, but long-term investments are generally treated as capital gains pretty much everywhere, and sometimes there is an amount of capital gains that you can earn before.

You start paying tax in the uk, for example, we have a 12 300 pound annual allowance that you know you can get that much without having to pay anything. And if you invest in tax privileged accounts like isis or iras or whatever, then you can reduce or avoid capital gains tax altogether. But if you invest larger amounts or use up your isa, your tax freelancers elsewhere, sometimes you will have to pay capital gains tax, sometimes you'll have to pay capital gains on other kind of assets. Maybe you sold a second property, for example, and tax loss.

Harvesting is a way to reduce the tax that you have to pay, because any investing losses you have any tax year will get offset against any gains you had in the same tax year. So you won't have to pay as much tax because you can offset the losses and therefore drop the gains, but not only that if you have a net loss in total for a year, you can often carry it to a future year to offset the capital gains. Tax liability then - and so you can take a loss this year and then reduce the capital gains tax you might have to pay next year as a result. So if you have a losing position, there are three things you can do to harvest that loss.

If your view in the stock has changed - and you decided you don't want to hold it any longer, it's really easy just go and sell it bank. The last done. The second option is to sell the stock and replace it temporarily with another stock that you feel has similar characteristics, prospects and upside. The temporary bit is because in most countries there are some kind of laws or preventative measures to stop you doing what is known as bed and breakfasting.

This is to stop you selling, for example, your tesla stock bank, a loss and then immediately buy the stock back. But if you go and buy it back 30 days later in the uk, for example, then the trick does work. The problem is that you have to sit without your tesla stock for 30 days, but if you have another high convection stock that you feel might have similar momentum and maybe even a similar upside, you might choose to go and park your money there instead and make Use of the tax loss, if you hold a market index etf, this works particularly well because you could sell out of your s p 500 index with vanguard, for example, with visa and immediately buy back the pretty much exactly the same thing. The s p 500 index with i shares i use.

Instead, they are completely different assets and, as a result, the bed and breakfasting rules don't apply and bang you get to bank your losses. Despite you kind of not changing anything about your investing strategy, this trick is very, very useful in a market crash as a way of going and cashing in a whole load of losses. The moment it happens without actually having to be out of the market, a slightly different version of tax loss harvesting is harvesting gains within that zero percent threshold. The process is exactly the same, and the thinking is the same.

You cash in stock every year and in the uk, for example, you can collect 12 300 pounds and capital gains without having to pay any tax on it whatsoever. So, if you're, in a position where your portfolio does have some gains, and you want to go and cash, some of them in without paying tax - that is something to consider. The second trick is to always go discount shopping. Now.

This is a bit bit deeper than you might think. When people talk about investing in stocks, the most common way that they talk about buying uh the stock, is you know trying to time the market in some way the share price will go up and down up and down over time, and you want to invest at The bottom points of the graph so that you can go and take advantage of buying in at the best possible price, and the problem with this is that timing. The market is incredibly difficult and on average, we'll lose you money, but there is a different way of looking at it. That actually works quite well.

Let's say you invest money regularly. Every single month, like most people, do you put in a percentage of your paycheck into your investing account. A lot of people will, at that point, go and distribute that amount of money into the different companies that they hold in their portfolio to you know maintain the distribution and the ratios or they'll keep investing in the company. They are most excited about at that particular point in time or something like that.

But a really smart strategy is to do neither of those usually you'll pick your stocks and you'll have a selection of companies that you are particularly interested in investing at any one point. Maybe you have 5 or 10 or 15 different stocks that you are particularly looking carefully at and you want to invest into so what i do with my investments. Is this each time i go and deposit money into my investing account as you go and look at? What's being sold currently in the discount aisle, usually at least one or two of my stocks are there on a massive sale for whatever reason something to do with the stock, something nothing to do with the stocks macro reason whatever, and so that day the day when I'm putting the money in when i do go shopping. I just go and buy that stuff.

That's currently on sale. Next time i come to the stock market shop. There might be a different stock that i want to buy in that bargain bin and this works, because you're essentially doing a passive version of timing. The market you're not trying to wait it out or get the point of entry exactly right, but on average over time.

Your buy-ins in the stocks that you hold will be at lower amounts uh as a result than if you just constantly distributed every single time evenly into the different stocks that you're purchasing now the next one is one of the most common mistakes that i see. People do and people love to debate this one on social media as well. This trick is to not subscribe to one fixed, investing strategy, people love to self-classify themselves and join this kind of like group of other people doing the same and creates rigid rules around their investing for no reason whatsoever. There's nothing out there saying that you have to pick one or the other, there's nothing saying that you can't ever go and switch or move between them.

You know i am a long-term investor. I am putting money in and i'm not touching it for 10 years. No matter what or i am a value investor and i won't touch early stage - growth stocks with a barge pool, because the pe ratios look bad or whatever. The fact is by limiting yourself to a very narrow strategy.

You are cutting off your agility. You are playing chess, but you have decided that you will only ever play with the pawns while everyone else gets to play the whole board times. Change things change the market moves in whatever ways it does, and you have to take advantage when things do change. You have to be nimble and you have to take advantage of all the different things available to you, rather than just cutting things off just because he decided for no particularly good reason.

You might play a sensible long-term investor game for a few years, maybe even a decade or two, but then something will happen and you might decide that you need to make a move right now on a an early stage, grey stock that just turned up, because just The optics and the catalyst on that stock look particularly amazing and that wouldn't normally play into your regular strategy. I'm not saying you should do everything all the time or gamble you don't need to day trade swing, trade by momentum, stocks, investing dividends, growth, value whatever you don't need to do all of those at the same time, but you do need to be prepared to take Advantage of whatever scenario happens to play out, the world of investing is rich and complicated, so don't restrict yourself by inventing rules. You've made up that don't actually exist. The next tip is to remember that every stock is expendable.

This one is just about as obvious. It is as it is actually difficult to implement in real life. People fall in love with companies. I see it all the time.

People join a fan club without realizing and then prophesies how they won't sell the stock for the next 20 years, no matter what they believe in the business, they believe in the ceo whatever, but investing for. You is a business in itself, so stop confusing business with being a member of a fan club if you want to be in a fan club by all means, go and join one, but don't make your investing decisions based on being in the fan club every stock. You buy should always have a sell price, a price at which you would sell the stock if it happened to reach that price tomorrow and yeah, you have to consider factors like short-term gain taxes in the us et cetera, et cetera. That's not what i'm talking about in general, you have to be prepared to sell a stock and the more your upside gets squeezed, the more ready to sell you should be.

I was making videos on this channel earlier this year, for example, when amd was trading as just over 70 dollars explaining why i was investing heavily into that stock at that time. But recently the share price went to over 160 and my latest target price is 196. by the way i've just launched my patreon and channel memberships and all members get access to the latest version of my target price. I'm gon na be putting them up over the next few days, uh, but anyway, with amd the upside that drops to about 22 percent.

As a result, while my upsides and some other stocks, i'm interested in got very large and i've been reducing my md position in favor of those other stocks over the last month or so as a result, and i'm going to do the exact same thing. Every single time i saw it out of lou said at 41 and a whole load of people told me that i am a complete idiot for doing so, because lucid went up all the way to 55, but loses stock. Isn't my mate? I am not in the lucid fan club, no matter how much i am interested in what they are doing, and i put my money in other places when i see a bigger upside and guess what lucid is now trading at 37. That's how that's how the game works.

The next tip is to be very careful with managing your investing costs. Costs are a much bigger driver of investing performance than many people realize. Often people will spend ages trying to optimize their stock picks, spend hours honing their strategy days weeks spent analyzing the different companies and then they're going to invest using a broker that charges. You know one percent, commission or foreign exchange fee per transaction, and maybe they also charge you know 0.5 annual management fee on top and before you know it you've already given up two and a half percent of your investment in just fees alone, while you probably could Have done the exact same movie using just a different, investing app for much less or even for free? Sometimes people just keep using the same platform they have used for a while.

You know a platform, you trust, a platform that is established and it's been around for a long time. You put in 500 pounds into your trusty, hargreaves lands down or bank investing account and they charge you 12 pounds for making the transaction and a 1 fee. On top, and without even thinking about it, you've just dropped 3.4 in fees and then the exact same amount again when you sell back out or maybe even a little more if you stock increases in value and so you've, just given up seven percent to the platform For no reason whatsoever and relative to you know, gains of 10 percent or 20 or whatever. That is a giant chunk.

Be smarter, pay very careful attention to the fees. I have some affiliate links to platforms like stake and etoro in the description that are both very good value compared to some of these big ones, so feel free to go and check them out if you're interested the next tip. The next tip is that investing is not about winning. I get so many comments from people saying that i missed out on some big investment.

I sold my nvidia stock and it's up another 60 since then. What a massive loser i didn't invest in a dog token, because i'm a boomer and it's up one gazillion percent, but here is an important truth that you just need to remember every single day. Investing is not about winning investing is not a zero sum game. You don't have to finish.

First, you don't have to beat anyone. My target personally is to get a 20 return per year. On average, with my active investing strategy, that's double what the market makes. On average - and it is actually incredibly difficult to get 20 consistently over time, very few people have actually done it for anyone who only started investing in the last three years.

I am sorry, but the sun won't always shine to try and hit my 20 target. I'm aiming for trying to reach 25 to 30, with the intent to then fail, probably to hit them but settle for the 20 that i will actually be happy with, and the key is to turn off all the noise about things going to the moon. The latest funny dog token that will change your life. I mean, if you think that i'm stupid for saying this by all means, go and do what you want to do.

It is your money. You can go and spend it on whatever you want, but i'm not here to win i'm here to build out a robust strategy over time. You can double your money if you put it all in red on the roulette table, and you know it plays red. You can double it again by doing the exact same thing for the second time, and we have a society that kind of glamorizes someone who bought the latest pointless, worthless, jpeg or a token and made a million percent return.

As though you know that person is the next warren buffett, but let's see how long that kind of strategy lasts and how robust it turns out to be over a span of let's say a few decades and i'll be quick with this next one. It is the most boring one, but it's also the most profound, the biggest factor in how much money you will make investing is not how good you are at picking stocks. It is not how well you turn the market. It is not even how long you stay in the market and none of those things.

The biggest factor is how much money you put into the investing portfolio in the first place shocking. I know so. Here's a secret that you probably already know, but you maybe want a little reminder on prioritize your time on figuring out how to increase your income over trying to get the best possible stock pick. I know it's counterintuitive, given what i talk about on my channel but find ways of earning more moving up the career ladder, maybe starting a side hustle starting a business, whatever think outside the box.

If you have to because it's easy to see the monthly salary arriving as a sort of a fixed thing, it just turns up to your account and that's it that's what you have to play with and then you get to decide how? Much of that you can put into investments, and you know you optimize your money, but if you figure out how to increase the amount that arrives in the first place and you can say, invest twice as much money as a result, it doesn't matter how good you Are at investing, you can go and keep it all in a market index for all you care and still make more money as a result, if you found this video useful, please don't forget to smash the like button for the youtube algorithm. Thank you so much for watching. I really really appreciate it and, as always i'll see you guys later.