What's up you guys, sasha here, i've noticed a growing trend recently of uk investing channels on youtube talking about their investment portfolios very often they'll go and put out monthly videos telling you exactly what their money is doing, how well their investments are going and sometimes when They can't think of anything else to talk about they'll, go and split it up and there'll, be a separate video for each different investment platform that they have. Their money in people seem to really love these videos because they get a lot of views and i've made one or two updates myself in the past, and i get a lot of requests from people very, very frequently in comments to go and do another one. And i am going to at some point, but before i do, i wanted to make a video telling you about a problem, a really big problem, with these investing updates i've gone and watched a ton of these videos on all the different kinds of investment channels that I could find, and in some cases i found a load of exaggeration. In other cases i saw blatant lies and a whole load of bs and i felt that this really needed to be called out now.

I'm not gon na name any names here, but if you watch these videos, you might go and recognize some of these patterns from some of the videos that you've seen yourself. First, let's talk about a very recent trend. That really really annoys me that i've seen a lot of people do, and this is related to free trade. Now a lot of people go and show their free chair portfolio to you and they show you the home screen, which shows you how their investments doing they're.

Like look at me. My investments have grown 100. I am an amazing investor. I've done so well.

My shares are so good. You should go and listen to more of my advice. You should go and do whatever it is that i tell you to do, and the problem is that it isn't really quite true. Here's my free trade, app you'll notice that i have about 1200 pounds in there and i have made an amazing, 1 000 return on my investment.

If i go to the next tab on the insides, it will show you that i have made a 515 return on my investments, since i opened my account at some point last year. Isn't that amazing now here is how it actually works and why this number actually is so ridiculously high. You see if anyone goes and makes videos about free trade on youtube. The likelihood is they have an affiliate link that they want you to click.

They put that link in the description below and so do i i have exactly the same link and what happens is in my videos i'll tell people that if they want to go and open a free trade portfolio, they can go and click. My link in the description below and if they go and do that and make the minimum deposit of two pounds or whatever they'll get a free share. But so will i see whenever you go and have somebody click on your link and they then go and open account they get a free share. You also get a free share, that's how you get remunerated for sending somebody their way, and these free shares actually get added to your account and are shown up as growth.

So whenever you go and see one of these and they have some insanely high numbers, the likelihood is most of that is made up of free shares. Mine is, and whenever you go and hear, people go and mention that if they don't say that if they go and try to show you these numbers and say, look at my investments, isn't it really good? You should just think in your head that it actually isn't that good, because all they did is get a free, a load of free shares and if they then go and break it down, which some of them do some begin going through their actual investments. You very quickly notice that none of their investments are anywhere near that 100 mark that they were showing you originally. Some of them are down some of them up a few percent, but for some reason literally, none of their companies have exploded in the time that they've held them.

So the average is way more than any of the things that make up the average trading 202. Have a similar issue with their returns: it's not the same though it works in almost the opposite kind of way. On the trading to one two home page, you get to see this return number and that return is like the average of all the different investments you've ever made and the returns those investments have had since the point when you made the investment - and so here the Reverse kind of thing is true, so if you go make an investment in something that returns really good returns a long time ago and then don't add anything to the portfolio, that number will actually be really high. But if you make frequent deposits - and if say those deposits actually increase over time, as maybe your earnings increase or you decide to put more money into investing or whatever, that investment number will actually come right down, because some of your investments will be from yesterday or Last week or last month and those haven't had the time to actually get any kind of growth on them and because that number is the average of all your different investments ever made, and it's not weighted in any way.

It's not weighted based on time or it's not sort of an annual equivalent. That number doesn't really make much sense. I actually made this exact point when i made a video about my trading 202 portfolio last time when that number was about 28 and i immediately said hey that 28 doesn't really mean much, but a lot of people go and show you this number and say: look At me, my investing portfolio does x, but actually it doesn't really mean much now, unlike free trade. Free shares from trading 202 do not go towards that number.

So that means that, whatever return you do see on, there is actually a return that these num that these people get. So it is sort of more genuine if you like, but it's still not really in anywhere representative of real performance of those stocks, also make sure that whenever somebody does show you one of those trading two on two portfolios or the free trade one you do go And look at that number - and this is really critical, because i've seen some videos where people go and say look at my thirty thousand pound investment portfolio and they do and jazzy thumbnail and everyone clicks on it. And you get lots of comments. Saying ooh lego, you! You have thirty thousand pounds in your investment portfolio only for them to go and show you that their net return.

The number that probably won't mention in the video is like negative or maybe plus not point four percent or something which kind of indicates that either they really suck at investing because their portfolio hasn't grown over time. Despite everyone else is growing, and maybe you shouldn't listen to them as much as they tell you you should or in what i think actually happens. A lot of these cases. They've gon na make the deposit into that portfolio like yesterday, by taking some money out of somewhere, maybe out of a savings account or maybe add their business or some somewhere, where they could find it for, like a day deposited into the app made.

A video about. Look at my thirty thousand pound investment portfolio then took it back out and put it back wherever they borrow it from just so that they could go and show off, because this is the kind of culture that we live in the same sort of issue that i Mentioned earlier, with trading 212 in terms of the overall number also applies to every single investing app when you go and look at individual stocks. So whenever somebody shows you a stock that they hold a particular company, usually you'll have the same issue but there'll be a single performance number attached to that it'll be like plus 27. It doesn't really mean much if they held that stock, for example.

For many many years, then that number is not as valid as if they held it for six months and they got the same high rate of return. It's really hard to tell with that number it what it really means. It just shows you the difference between what the value of your stocks is right now to the total amount of money you ever put into that stock and as a proportion of that money. So so that's that's it.

It just shows you that ratio - it's not really in any way representative and if say, one stock has a plus 45 and another one has plus seven percent. It doesn't mean the plus 45 is any better because it could have been held much longer and as a result, that number is higher because of that, rather than because it's a better stock and it has been performing better because you can't really tell next. Let's talk about the photoshop crew, this is a relatively new trend that i've noticed. That is really quite bothering me it shouldn't, but it is you'll see these videos where people are going to talk about their amazing investments.

Quite often these people are quite young, and so they probably haven't had much time to do investing, so they haven't had much time for those investments to actually grow and build lots of percentages. And so the moment you see really high numbers and really high returns on these. Sometimes those two factors don't quite stack up now. When i see these videos quite often what will happen is they won't show you what's happening on their phone screen? They won't do a recording of their phone screen.

You know that red bar at the top of the phone screen showing you that they're recording it they won't move the things around and click things. They'll just show you a really quick. Like hey. Look at my phone move it around; okay, you've, seen it or or maybe they'll just do a screenshot, which is just a fix.

Like here's, a picture, here's a picture of my investments to prove how amazing i am in investing and the reason they do. That is because they literally just gone and taken a picture of an account they've opened gone into photoshop or whatever other software they like to use, gone and changed all the numbers to make. It look amazing, add a few zeros. You know like make something.

Forty thousand pounds or twenty thousand pounds, or whatever they felt, would be sort of commensurate with the level of awesome that they want to show in their video and then they go and show you that and then they just talk a complete load of nonsense. For the rest of the video, if you go and see something like that and they don't show any kind of evidence, the likelihood is that probably is what's going on now, i'm going to make a few videos about my personal investments and how they are performing, and Hopefully, i won't fall into any of these traps. I won't make any of these really bad mistakes when i do them. If you did enjoy this video - and you want to make sure more people have the chance to find out about what's going on so that they understand it better make sure you smash the like button for the youtube algorithm.

Thank you so much for watching. I really appreciate it if you've managed to get right to the end of the video. Thank you so much and i'll see you guys in the next video.