All Learn Articles

ISAs

How bed and ISA resets your cost basis and distorts investment returns

Moving shares into an ISA means selling them first—and that disposal triggers a tax bill, consumes allowance, and permanently erases the price you originally paid.

Capital Gains Tax

UK Capital Gains Tax on Investments: Rates, Rules and Strategies

Rates are 18% and 24% for 2026/27 and the exempt amount is £3,000, down 75.6% in four years. What that changes, and the one move worth more than all the rate planning.

ISAs

UK Pension vs ISA: Which Should You Prioritise?

Compare pensions and ISAs side by side: tax relief, access rules, and when to prioritise each.

SIPP

SIPP Carry Forward: The £240,000 Nobody Can Reach

How pension carry forward works: eligibility, worked examples, earnings limits, and tapered allowance.

Pension Tax Relief

How to Top Up Your Pension

Between £100,000 and £125,140 of income a pension contribution attracts 60% relief, the highest available to anyone in the UK. Below that the answer is less obvious than most guides admit.

Investment Strategy

Multi-Asset Portfolio Management: What Running One Involves

What running a multi-asset portfolio actually involves: how the asset classes interact, why the allocation drifts on its own, and the measurement that decides whether any of it is working. Worked examples in pounds.

Precious Metals

Tracking Precious Metals and Real Estate Returns

Gold, silver and property are held because they do not behave like stocks. That is exactly why they are hard to track: the usual "I bought at this price, it is now that price" formula leaves out the parts that are unique to each. For metals it is premiums, storage and the currency. For property it is the fact that money flows in and out of a rental all year, and the return sits in the flows, not the price.

Savings & Cash

Savings Interest Tracker: Calculate and Compare Returns

Track your savings account interest automatically and compare returns to other investments.

Crypto

Crypto Portfolio Tracker: Track Your Real Gains Across Exchanges

Track your cryptocurrency portfolio with real gain calculations and staking rewards tracking.

Stocks

Stock Portfolio Tracker with Dividend Tracking

Track your stock portfolio with automatic dividend tracking and true performance metrics.

Pension Tax Relief

Pension Tax Relief Explained

A £4,800 pension contribution costs a £62,000 earner £2,880 through relief at source and £2,784 through salary sacrifice. That £96 gap is the entire National Insurance advantage of sacrifice at this salary, which is about a quarter of the saving most explainers quote, because they apply an 8% NI rate to someone who is paying 2%.

Auto-Enrolment

Auto-Enrolment Pensions Explained

Three years opted out at 30 costs about £11,900 of employer money by 65. The rules, the thresholds for 2026/27, and why the 8% minimum is an anchor rather than a floor.

Workplace Pensions

UK Workplace Pension Explained

Taking a £64,000 pot as cash at 57 while earning £38,000 costs £16,746 in tax (2026/27). Drawn across three retired years instead, the same money costs £2,058. DC against DB, what happens when you move job, and how the pot comes out.

Diversification

Asset Correlation: Why It Fails in a Crash

A 60/40 portfolio whose sleeves correlate at -0.3 carries about 9.2% annual volatility. At +1 the same two holdings carry 12.4%, and correlations climb toward +1 in exactly the selloffs the diversification was bought to survive.

Asset Allocation

How to Build a Multi-Asset Portfolio from Scratch

Building a multi-asset portfolio is four decisions made in order: what the money is for, which asset classes, what split, and how you will know it is working. Skip the fourth and the first three are guesswork, because a diversified portfolio you cannot measure stops being diversified in a year.

Returns & Performance

How to Calculate True Investment Returns

Why simple ROI formulas miss the full picture and how to calculate real returns.

Returns & Performance

Capital Flow Tracking: See Your True Investment Returns

Capital flow tracking is the foundation of understanding your true investment performance.

Diversification

Multi-Asset vs Single-Asset Investing

The honest version of this comparison is uncomfortable: over the past two decades a single-asset portfolio in global stocks beat a diversified one on total return, and beat it by a wide margin. A £100,000 invested in stocks alone at the roughly 10.5% annualised return of the period 2004 to 2024 would have grown to about £737,000. A diversified mix of stocks, bonds, gold and cash at roughly 7.5% would have grown to about £425,000, around 58% of the stock-only result. Diversification wins nothing on paper; it wins on the requirement the concentrated version places on you, which is sitting through losses that most people cannot sit through.

Rebalancing

Rebalancing a Multi-Asset Portfolio

Rebalancing means bringing your portfolio back to the allocation you chose after market moves have pushed it off target. A portfolio that drifts from 50% stocks to 65% stocks carries more equity risk than you decided to hold, and if the market then falls 30%, you lose more than you budgeted for. Rebalancing is how you keep the risk profile you actually chose, rather than the one the market handed you.

Tools & Comparisons

Best Portfolio Tracker in 2026: What Actually Matters

What makes a good portfolio tracker? The features that matter for accurate wealth tracking.

Getting Started

Portfolio Tracker for Beginners: How to Track Investments in 2026

New to investing? Learn how to track your portfolio and understand your returns.

Returns & Performance

Why Your Portfolio Tracker Is Lying About Your Investment Returns

Most investors unknowingly rely on flawed return calculations that ignore deposits, withdrawals, and reinvested income - distortions that compound over years into wildly inaccurate performance figures.

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