Hey guys, it's sasha and today i'm going to share with you seven crazy, investing tricks. Each of these tricks is an absolute game changer for your investing strategy. But if you apply all seven of these together, you might be very surprised at the impact on your investing returns. Now the tricks i will talk about are pretty sophisticated they're, not some of the basics.

You might be used to hearing i'll need to explain some of them in quite a bit of detail because they are pretty complex and some of them use some legal loopholes that are not immediately obvious, and because of that, i need to make the obligatory disclaimer. I am not your financial advisor and i am not a tax lawyer. I am just a random guy on youtube, sharing some cool stuff, some cool tricks that you might not have heard before. If you do need actual financial advice, please make sure you go and seek the help of a suitably qualified professional.

Just before i jump into the first trick. Remember that picking a cheaper investing platform is the easiest way you can make more money investing and for those who live in the uk, the cheapest investing platform out there is lightyear who just happened to be the sponsor of today's video lightyear is a brand new and The only investing platform in uk that lets you invest in u.s stocks completely for free. You don't pay any commission on trading stocks a bit like some of the other new investing apps, but you also don't pay any foreign exchange fees either. Neither when you deposit, neither when you make the transactions light year, lets you exchange up to 3 000 pounds per month with no fees at all.

It will cost you nothing which makes light year cheaper than free trade trading 2 or any other platform. If you're putting in less than three thousand pounds per month, they'll even give you ten dollars for signing up and depositing at least one pound. If you use my link in the description, so you can actually get paid to try the only free investing app in the uk all right. The first investing trick on my list that i'm going to share with you is probably the best known one and it's the smart way to harvest tax losses in the us uk.

In most other countries, you have to pay capital gains tax when you make money from investing anything outside your isa in the uk or outside your ira in the us, and the capital gains is paid on the sum of all your investing returns. All of your winners and all of your losers netted out. So if you have too many winners and not enough losers in a year, a good problem to have you'll have to pay a lot of tax and the big problem is that to pay the tax. You will have to sell some of your stocks or use money.

You would otherwise choose to invest, but you can reduce the amount of tax you have to pay or not pay any at all by creating some fake losers in your portfolio. Every year there will be occasions when the stock market takes a dip, some sort of a correction, maybe a flash crash, maybe a sell-off in a particular sector. Inflation fees like we're having now or whatever, and at that point your investments might drop in value. You can sell your investments to capture that loss, that you can then offset against your gains.

But what, if you don't want to sell your investments, because you want to hold them long term? Well, here is the trick: if you sell the investments at a loss and then buy them back within 30 days, then you can't use the loss to offset your gains because there are wash sale rules in the us and bed and breakfast rules in the uk. Similar laws exist in many other countries too, so this trick new thing doesn't really work, but there are three ways where you can beat these restrictions where you can use this trick. First, if you're invested in an index fund like the s p 500, it is super easy. Let's say the s p 500 drops and it is now three percent down for the year and you want to go and capture that loss.

All you have to do is: go and sell the s, p, 500 etf and buy back a different one by a different provider. So you can sell your vanguard, fund vu or vusa depending on where you live and then just go and buy the exact same one. By ishares back because the ics etf is a different asset, you get to capture your loss on the vanguard, one and then be right back in the s p, 500, without having to wait 30 days. If you own shares, you can do the exact same trick by selling the shares, and rather than buying back the shares immediately buying back a non-leveraged cfd.

Instead, now it might cost you a tiny amount of fees and cfds do carry a whole different level of risk. That you need to make sure you're, aware of and make sure you're comfortable with, but 31 days later you could go and sell that cfd bag and buy back into the shares again because the 30-day window has passed and it will mean you have not been out Of the market for any length of time, just be very careful, with short-term capital gains questions being taxed as normal income. If you live in the united states in uk, you can also do this trick with different share classes, not something you can do in the us. But in the uk let's say: you're invested in google and you own google class a shares.

Ticker, google, with the l at the end, you can go and sell those class a shares at a loss and then go and buy some class c goog shares. Instead, the only difference between those shares is voting rights, but that's probably not all that important to most people you can see both of these are available in light year by the way and making the switch from one to the other is super easy now. The next trick is the exact opposite is to remember, to sell your gains to maximize the zero percent tax bracket in the uk. You can earn up to 12 300 pounds per year in capital gains without paying any tax in the us long-term capital gains.

Tax rate is zero percent if you're earning under 41 675 dollars or 83 350 as a married couple, and many people fail to take advantage of this massive loophole. You'll sit there on your investments. You've been diligently putting money into your investment account for 20 years and at the end of the 20 years you decide to go and buy a bigger house or maybe to pass the money on to your children, maybe buy them a house whatever. It is that you need, and you have made two hundred thousand dollars in capital gains.

Congratulations. Your investments have done very well in the us. You'll have to pay 15 on most of that money. That's 30! 000.

In the uk, it's even more twenty percent of the money that you have to pay the tax man above the zero percent. So that's roughly speaking, forty thousand dollars. But if you used this loophole every year, you wouldn't have had to pay a penny, because you could have collected a zero percent amount every single year and at the end of the 20 years, not owe any tax whatsoever. Every year you can sell enough of your stocks to maximize the 0 capital gains bracket and then immediately reinvest that money in the u.s.

You can even reinvest it right back into exactly the same shares you just sold in the uk, though. Bed and breakfast rules apply to gains in the same way as to losses, so you can only do this trick if you sell an etf and then buy a different one, buy different classes of shares or temporarily replace your shares with cfds. As in the previous example, this way you are never really cashing in your investments: you're not staying out of the market, but you're reducing the final tax bill whenever you do want to cash in every single year now the next trick might not seem obvious, and in A way it kind of makes use of the same rules just in a very twisted sort of way. If you've sold a position in a stock and that stock then went and dropped massively in price a few days later after you've sold it, you could choose to go and buy it right back, because it can make a crazy amount of money, not not in the Way, you think this doesn't work in the u.s by the way, this trick only works in the uk uh and some other countries as well, but because, if you buy the stock back within 30 days in the uk, her majesty's revenue service will assume that you never Sold the original stock for capital gains calculations because of the bed and breakfast rules.

So let's use a simple real life example. From last year, let's say you went and bought lucid motors shares at 17 in may last year, when i made a video saying that i thought the stock was massively undervalued, then let's say you went and sold all of your stock in november for, for example, 55, Then the stock fell back right down to 37, just a few days later, and you looked at it and you decided to use this trick and you decided to buy back in again the stock right now, as i'm recording this video as at 41. So you've made a profit twice from 17 to 55: that's a gain of 38 and then again from 37 to 41. The second time round.

That's another four dollar game, so you've really made 42 dollars in total, which is 250 percent roughly of the original share price. Insane right, but because the tax man doesn't see it that way because they think, according to their rules, you've, never sold the shares in november because you bought them back within 30 days, then that means for tax purposes. You only went from 17 to the current price of 41, that's a gain of 24, which is 140, so you go and pay the tax on 140 gain, but the difference between 140 percent that you just paid tax on and that's 250 - that you really made is Free you get to keep 110 percent gain without owing any tax on it whatsoever. Pretty neat: okay, next trick, you can take advantage of the forced stock buying phenomenon in the stock market, and this one is a bit less precise, but it can be really nifty as companies growing mature.

There are a few specific points in the life cycle of a company when a lot of people will start buying a lot of their shares and when a lot of people start buying a lot of shares that can cause the share price to go up considerably. The two most common times when a company's shares, get very very popular with buyers, is when the company is included in the s p 500 and when the stock is classed as investment grade. For the first time when a company joins the s, p 500, every single index out there that directly or indirectly tracks the s p 500 has to go and buy those shares. Because now that company is one of the constituents of the index, many funds and institutional investors also have rules internally that require their investments to come from inside the s p 500 to get included in the s p.

500. At the moment, a company has to be a u.s company with a market cap of at least 11.8 billion dollars have high liquidity and be profitable for at least a year. Tesla joined the s p 500 at the end of 2020, and there was a frenzy of share buying that sent the share price up by 33 sure there were a million other factors, i'm aware and yeah. A lot of that is driven by hype and that's what drives a lot of the price up.

But inclusion in the sap 500 is very frequently the same time when there's a big share price catalyst that sends the share price up. Another catalyst is becoming investment grade, which is a more complex classification. Your stock has to be classed as triple b. What triple b minus uh to be investment grade being investment grade is basically just saying that the company has a good credit rating.

If you like, it's based on a whole load of different factors, and this measure of how likely the company is to default on its payments or how unlikely and carrying on with tesla as the example tesla is currently rated as double b, plus, this increase from double B, just a few days after their q3 earnings report came out and there is an expectation that they might well be upgraded again after the q4 report that comes out at the end of january, or maybe after the q1 report. That is coming three months later. Many risk-averse institutional investors, like pension funds, for example, have specific restrictions which mean they can't invest in any stocks that are not investment grade. So the moment a stock becomes investment grade.

It opens up a whole new group of investors who previously weren't allowed to buy those shares at all. Now. The next trick is to invest in great companies before they go public. This one is more difficult and definitely carries a whole lot more risk than some of the other tricks, but it's also the way you can sometimes get into a massively profitable company very, very early on and make pretty ridiculous returns on your investments.

Just make sure you are really careful with how much of your total portfolio you put into these early stage companies. My recommendation is to be on the conservative side of things. You can invest in companies before they go public through crowdfunding websites. There are many many different ones out there so go and take a look.

You can also look on some of the angel investing websites or there are specific platforms for being able to invest in private companies as well um. There are usually some very early stage startups and some of these, so you just got to do your homework. You got to do quite a lot of due diligence and there are a lot of risks. The majority of the companies that you can invest in through these platforms just simply won't make it.

You also have very limited real terms, information on which to base your decision on. Usually, the financial companies are brand new, they have very limited amount of data and it is very difficult to determine how good their products really are. There is a massive chance, an over 50 chance of losing all of the money that you put in, and these platforms also have a lot of noise. There are a lot of pretty presentations by companies saying they're, going to be the uber for gardening or the airbnb for garden sheds or whatever, and the key is to be extremely selective.

Don't go and put your money into like this one, and maybe this one and that one go and be super selective, invest very rarely, and only in the one or two companies that really get you going. And you can see a massive massive, massive difference in there and some companies that are already showing signs of dominating their market. Sometimes every now and then one of these goes and does a big fundraiser on one of these platforms before they go public. And sometimes you can get in at a much much lower valuation at this point than when the company does go public, maybe a year or two later other than having a big risk of losing all of your money.

The other really big big risk with these is that the investments are not liquid, because the stock doesn't trade publicly. You can't just go on your investment platform and sell it to get some money, and even if the company does eventually go public, it might be many. Many years before it does so be very careful with this now the next tip on my list is to employ elective dip buying when you invest in stocks. It's my favorite strategy that i use that makes a really big difference to returns, and it's just actually quite simple.

Most investors will make regular deposits into their accounts. For example, every month after you've been paid and many people will then go and spread their investments into their stocks, sometimes you'll even have a ready-made pie to do it for you, so you just go and buy all the same stocks that you already have, and every Month you go and add to your positions. I don't do that every time i deposit money. I look at what's for sale, specifically at that point in time.

In the discount aisle of the shop, i usually hold around five big positions and five smaller positions in my portfolio, but i also have another 10 to 20 stocks that i am very interested in and have already researched, but don't have a position in because the share Price didn't give me enough upside. Very often when i come to invest one of the ten stocks that i do have a position in is on sale. Sometimes it's nothing to do with the company some kind of overall stock market effect. Maybe they posted slightly less good.

Quarterly results: maybe there was an overreaction to something maybe there's some kind of news happening, sometimes one of the other 10 to 20 companies that i'm really interested in suddenly had a massive sell-off, but not for any good reason. Not for any reason that would preclude me from still being interested now, every time i come shopping to the stock market, i just go and buy the discounted stuff, not any discounted stuff. Obviously, only the stocks that i have already researched and valued and are on my shortlist, and this means that my portfolio distribution will sway and change over time. It also means that most of my stocks that i'm investing in i am buying at 10 to 20 percent.

Less than if i was just spreading my money around all of my investments, every single time i deposited and that just means that all things being equal, my return on those investments will be 10 to 20 percent more as a result, without me needing to do anything At all and 10 to 20 extra on a position is a big difference, especially if you get a big exit where you get like, say a hundred percent return and that ten to twenty percent multiplies as a result. The next tip is one that might rub some people up the wrong way. I am aware of that, because it goes against a lot of very popular financial advice, including right here on youtube, and this is using indirect leverage in investing. I actually use very little direct leverage when i invest.

I don't use margin when i make my investments, but i do carry personal debt a reasonable amount of it at the same time as having an investing portfolio, and some people will find this weird, because the overwhelming advice out there is that you should pay down your Debts first, you know it's really bad to have debts and only then go and invest, but i simply don't see things that way. All of my debt is sitting at zero percent or pretty much zero percent rates and the total cost of my debt is less than one percent per year and i'm trying to earn thirty percent as my target per year on average through my investments. I also invest money into my business as well, and i'm targeting even greater rates of return in there so mathematically. It makes very little sense to go and take any money that is sitting there, working really hard earning 30 a year or more.

Take that money and pay off debt. That is costing me absolutely nothing with it. Instead. Now don't get me wrong, i'm not trying to maximize this or take it to like the absolute most ridiculous position and borrow all the way to the kilter.

But i do have a mortgage on my property and a reasonably big one, and i have a a bunch of other personal debt too. In essence, i am basically taking money from the bank and putting it into these different forms of investment and letting the money the bank gives me for free earned me 30 a year instead, and yet there is a big risk. This is definitely not an approach. I would recommend for anyone unless you are making that decision for yourself based on your specific circumstances.

But the worst case scenario in this situation is that i cash some of my investments or pull money out of the business and pay down all that debt, because i have far more money as a result of doing this. For some time. In my investments than i do have in debt and make sure that my approach is sensible, because even if there is a massive market crash - or i lose most of my investment value, i can still go and cash it in and repay all of the debt. Without going into financial trouble, but every year that i am not in a position where i have to cash everything you know the world is burning.

My debt is getting uh out of hand every year that doesn't happen. My debt is just sitting there being eaten by the coyote of inflation, while my investments are earning me money. So i'm pretty happy with the setup. If you found this video useful, i would really really appreciate if you could just hit that 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.