Financial Notes

MITCH’S NOTE 👋

Tough week for the investment portfolio! My Trading 212 portfolio is down 2% (-£1,819) as at writing, and it very much feels like the markets are feeling a little bit volatile in recent weeks, so lets talk about it…

MARKETS 📈

The VIX is a measure of market volatility, and well, its signalling a lot of it recently, being up 41% in the past month:

Why is this useful?

Well the VIX Index reflects the market’s expectation of near term volatility, it’s essentially a real time “fear gauge” for US equity markets.

It reinforces what i’m feeling, but also puts some facts behind it too. And you all know how I love my facts & figures.

But what I don’t want to do is insinuate we’re in any worse of a position because looking at the VIX being up 40% might ring some alarm bells, perhaps unnecessarily.

To retain some perspective, I think its important to benchmark this metric against historical data, which we can see, is nowhere near the highs of the 2020 pandemic crash or the 08 financial crisis.

Is it elevated from market lows? Yes, but it’s not where it was during times where the market declined substantially.

That’s not to say it can’t rise to those peak levels of volatility in the short term, after all I have no idea what’s going to happen in the market!

But perhaps it's not quite as doom and gloom as some media outlets would have you believe, at least as things stand anyway!

The same can’t be said for the cryptocurrency market in the past few weeks…

Bitcoin is in a bear market right now with, being down -25% in the past month, and down 33% from all time highs, trading at $83,000 a coin, a far cry away from its all time high’s of $125,000!

…OUCH

Of course this would be the case just 6 weeks after the FCA approve crypto ETN’s within Stocks ISA’s, making cryptocurrency a far more accessible investment just as it enters into a bear market.

For more details on that, check out my video at the end of this email!

It’s not just the crypto market though thats not having a good time of it recently.

The UK stock market is having a pretty rough time of it, well kind of anyway…

Earlier this week I saw this headline:

And here is the data that sits behind it:

UK investors are dumping UK stocks, HEAVILY! And have been progressively doing so in the BILLIONS of £’s for pretty much the last decade.

This kind of shocked me if i’m honest, in that the outflows, especially in the last 5 years are becoming bigger and bigger.

With 2025 showing outflows of about £26B… another OUCH moment!

No wonder Rachel Reeves is desperate to drum up additional investment in UK markets.

It is being offset slightly by foreign investors buying into the market, but only to the tune of about £15B.

A formula that doesn’t bode well for future UK markets being prosperous.

That being said though, the unloved FTSE 100 has outperformed the S&P500 so far in 2025, I bet you didn’t expect me to say that!

It’s rather strange to say, given the appetite to invest in UK stocks clearly isn’t overwhelmingly supportive of higher market prices, and it’s not very often the FTSE100 does outperform US equities if i’m honest.

To be honest, the last time it did outperform was in 2022, and that was only because the US stock market performed so terribly it was largely a given, the time before that was 2016!

Hopefully this Labour government can pull off some kind of miracle and improve the state of the nation, and its attractiveness for both domestic and foreign investment in the near future to continue what has admittedly been very decent performance so far in 2025, into 2026 and beyond!

PERSONAL FINANCE 💷

Good news this week for personal finances, the FSCS (Financial Services Compensation Scheme) have increased the protection on customer cash deposits held with financial institutions from £85,000 to £120,000 to “keep pace with inflation".

It’s a shame we don’t seem to be getting the same inflationary adjustment on income tax bands but thats another story for another day….

The change is the first time of an uplift since 2017, and is probably welcomed news for higher net worth individuals who may have accounts with multiple banking providers to ensure they’re not exposed to bank failure in anyway.

Perhaps a lesser known rule (which I wasn’t aware of admittedly) is that if you receive an influx of funds due to events like inheritance, house sale or life insurance payout, customers are eligible for extra deposit protection for 6 months, with this guarantee increasing from £1,000,000 to £1,400,000.

Remember that FSCS protection applies per person, per banking licence, not per brand. Some banks share the same licence even if they trade under different names.

Within Lloyds Banking Group, Halifax and Bank of Scotland both use the Bank of Scotland plc licence. Lloyds Bank, however, uses a separate licence (Lloyds Bank plc). Confusing right? Let me explain…

So if you had:

you would be protected for:

In total, that means £170,000 of the £200,000 would be covered by the FSCS.

To find out if your accounts are with different brands under the same banking license you can check the Financial Services Register or the FSCS website.

COOL STUFF ⭐️

This week I’m meeting up with Trading 212 in London. These meetings take place periodically where we chat strategically about our creator partnership together. In these meetings, party of the agenda is to try and give them feedback and insights from my audience to help them improve the platform. A couple of things on my list this week are SIPP’s & Junior ISA’s, but if there is any additional features, functionality or insights you’d like on the platform, reply to this email and let me know!

BONUS STUFF ⭐️

VIDEO OF THE WEEK 🎬

This week I interviewed the President of 21Shares who are a cryptocurrency ETN provider to get all the latest information on how cryptocurrency in ISA’s will work, you can watch it here in case you missed it: