[ad_1] Image source: Rolls-Royce plc Rolls-Royce Holdings’ (LSE:RR.) share price has been a bit flat of late. However, I don’t think this should detract from the fact that just before Father Christmas arrived in December 2020, the aerospace and defence group’s shares were changing hands for £1.16. As we enter the festive season five years’ later, they are now trading at £11.02. That’s an astonishing increase of 850%. It means a £10,000 investment then would now be worth an incredible £95,000. And this excludes the two dividends that have been paid over this period. Include these and the gain would…
Author: user
[ad_1] Image source: Getty Images As we head into 2026, I have 37 holdings across my Stocks and Shares ISA and SIPP. Without further ado, here are my top 10, listed from largest to smallest. 1. Scottish Mortgage As an investment trust, Scottish Mortgage Investment Trust (LSE:SMT) is an outlier in this list. But it gives me broad exposure to global growth themes like AI, space exploration, and digital payments. A key attraction here is that Scottish Mortgage also gives me exposure to private companies that I can’t buy individually. These include SpaceX, Stripe, Databricks, ByteDance, and smaller ones that might…
[ad_1] Image source: Getty Images Hope springs eternal, but I’m struggling to find reasons to be upbeat about the BP (LSE: BP) share price. I bought the FTSE 100 oil giant back in the spring, when it was under fire on all fronts, hoping to take advantage of its many troubles. I knew I was taking a chance. So much has gone wrong for BP over the last 15 years. The shift towards renewables always looked half-hearted, unsettling traditional investors without convincing green activists either. The sliding oil price has hurt all producers, but BP’s faced problems of its own, including weaker refining and…
[ad_1] Image source: Getty Images I won’t sugarcoat this: the Taylor Wimpey (LSE: TW) share price had an absolute stinker in 2025, falling 16%. 2024 was horrible too. The housebuilder is down almost 30% across those two years combined. Unfortunately, I’ve held the FTSE 250 stock throughout. When I first bought it in 2023, it was still a member of the FTSE 100. The rot goes deeper than that. A decade ago, way back in pre-Brexit Christmas 2015, Taylor Wimpey shares traded at around 200p. Today they sit at roughly half that, near 100p. The roof is leaky and the foundations look shaky, yet…
[ad_1] Image source: Getty Images How might an investor turn a £20,000 lump sum into a passive income? With the right strategy and a few years to work with, earning a yearly income of £8,667 from that amount isn’t farfetched. One popular approach is drip-feeding – slowly investing the cash over time to smooth out the ups and downs. But this method of incremental investing comes with a surprising drawback. Drip-feeding Firstly, what is drip-feeding? It’s a type of investing – sometimes called ‘pound-cost averaging’ or ‘dollar-cost averaging’ in the US – where a cash sum is invested bit by…
[ad_1] Image source: Getty Images Last Thursday (18 December), the Bank of England committee decided to cut the base interest rate to 3.75%. With interest rates at the lowest level in three years, some income investors are looking to dividend stocks to generate a higher yield. Of course, buying stocks is riskier than keeping cash in a savings account, but here are two options with very generous payouts. First up is the Supermarket Income REIT (LSE:SUPR). The current dividend yield is 7.68%, with the stock price up 19% in the past year. As the name suggests, it makes money by…
[ad_1] Image source: Getty Images Generating a passive income from a portfolio of UK stocks beats working for a living. Dividend-paying shares deliver a second income stream without all the effort of getting to work. Better still, that income should rise over time, because most dividend-paying FTSE 100 and FTSE 250 companies aim to increase payouts year after year. That’s not guaranteed of course, nothing is with equities. So investors should diversify across at least a dozen stocks to spread their risk. Many would-be investors are scared off by stock market volatility but, over the long run, this is the…
[ad_1] Traffic fatalities continue to plague cities across the globe. Vision Zero – the ambitious global strategy to eliminate all traffic deaths and severe injuries – has made great strides, yielding meaningful progress through investments in road safety, pedestrian infrastructure, and public awareness campaigns. But aspirations are starting to outpace the actual capabilities of standard traffic management systems. Most traffic systems take a reactive posture, responding to incidents after they happen. In other words, they can only assess and address the circumstances that lead to traffic issues once a worst-case scenario has already occurred. Now, thanks to ongoing innovations in AI and sensor technologies, preventative traffic management…
[ad_1] Image source: Getty Images Nvidia (NASDAQ:NVDA) shares have risen by more than 1,000% in just two years. This incredible rally propelled the company to a valuation over $5trn a few months ago — a feat no other business has ever achieved. As debate rages over whether we’re in a sustainable AI boom or a bubble ready to burst, this is a good time to evaluate the firm’s prospects for next year and beyond. Here’s what I think the future might hold for Nvidia shares. The king of AI chips Nvidia’s tremendous success is due to its current stranglehold on…
[ad_1] Image source: Getty Images Bad news for peace on earth is good news for BAE Systems’ (LSE: BA) shares. That’s a massive tragedy, but unless humanity changes its warlike ways, defence manufacturers like this one will remain in demand. As will other weapons makers such as Babcock International Group (LSE: BAB). World peace must be in a horrible state right now, because the BAE Systems share price has rocketed 48% over the last year and an astonishing 280% over five years. FTSE 100 defensives Babcock, the smaller of the two FTSE 100 stocks, with a £6bn market-cap versus BAE’s £50bn, has put that…