What caught my eye this week.
Did you wake up on Wednesday ready to HODL? Your brain addled with FOMO? Your eyes on the horizon, heart set on Going To The Moon?
You’re a Monevator reader so probably not. Amen to that!
Still, I believe there’s a place for Bitcoin in sensible portfolios. Hence I welcomed the FCA’s reversal on banning us from getting crypto exposure via exchange-traded notes (ETNs) linked to cryptocurrencies.
The new rules came in on 8 October. My co-blogger wrote a huge guide to the ins and outs of crypto ETNs in advance.
But then Wednesday rolled around, and from what I could tell from my platforms we still couldn’t buy crypto ETNs.
From This Is Money:
…any keen investor looking to get in early will have been disappointed to find that despite the ban lifting, these ETN products are still not available to retail investors.
In fact, investors will have to wait until at least 13 October before they are able to but crypto ETNs.
The delay comes as a result ETN providers being required to submit their prospectuses for FCA approval before they can offer these products.
However, the FCA only began accepting draft prospectuses on 25 September.
According to Financial Times sources, one person familiar with the matter said the FCA and the London Stock Exchange were ‘going back and forth’ on whether they needed a new segment of the exchange for these crypto products.
So much for the UK getting back on the front foot when it comes to innovation and whatnot, eh?
Musical shares
Indeed it gets worse! Several readers (including an industry insider) forwarded me a link to further ‘guidance’ from HMRC.
Why the air quotes? Well, does this extract from the document seem like a clear route forward to you?
Initially, cETNs will be automatically eligible for inclusion in stocks and shares ISAs.
From 6 April 2026, they will be reclassified as qualifying investments within the Innovative Finance ISA (IFISA).
Say what now? Crypto ETNs will be allowed in ISAs – but then next year they’ll need to be shifted over to Innovative Finance ISAs? A wrapper some aficionados have been mentally moving on to the extinction-watch Red List?
Many brokers do not even offer Innovative ISAs. Are they going to build and get regulatory approval for them by April? Remember the FCA didn’t approve crypto ETNs in time for its own launch date.
My industry contact noted we saw similar shenanigans with Long-Term Asset Funds. These were initially only available in Innovative Finance ISAs. But from April 2026 you can hold them in normal ISAs after all.
Why all the kerfuffle and making life complicated? (Also, if you’re wondering what a Long-Term Asset Fund is then you’ve sort of proved my point.)
It’s hard to even find a list of the crypto ETNs that should get approval from the FCA. I eventually found this one at the broker Saxo. No idea if it’s accurate or complete.
Remember similar products have been busily trading in Europe and the US for many years now.
Who gives a sausage?
I asked my co-blogger The Accumulator for his thoughts on this Innovative Finance ISA crypto curveball.
TA was non-plussed:
Seems a bit like fractional shares again. Some traffic warden in a position of authority is saying: “well actually if you look at subsection 3, paragraph 6…”
But eventually a coalition of forces will shout, “broken Britain” at them enough times that they’ll just go, “yeah fuckit, just put it in an ISA, who gives a shit?”
Thinking about this – and whether the upcoming Budget will see the pension tax-free lump sum scrapped or stamp duty revamped or pension relief curbed – I feel a shiver of despair.
How can we help ordinary people get less confused about saving and investing when the powers-that-be seem bent on making everything as uncertain as possible?
Have a great weekend.
*With apologies to the spirit of Harold Wilson.
From Monevator
Our updated guide to help you find the best online broker – Monevator
Investing when the market is expensive – Monevator
From the archive-ator: Become your money hero – Monevator
News
First-time buyers could save hundreds in sales plan, government says – BBC
Chancellor gets £2bn Budget boost after VAT error – Yahoo Finance
Conservatives would scrap stamp duty, Badenoch announces – BBC
Resolution Foundation: it’s now almost impossible to work to riches – Sky News
HMRC’s brings in an extra £4.6bn thanks to big data – Pinsent Masons
Another major NIC tax raid on the cards, economists warn – City AM
EU steel tariff ‘biggest ever crisis’ for UK industry [Cough cough] – BBC
Shawbrook confirms plans to float on LSE at mooted £2bn valuation – Yahoo Finance
The council tax house price lottery – This Is Money
UK set to appoint a ‘digital markets champion’ – The Block
More gains would be normal – Chart Kid Matt
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Barclays switch offer: get up to £400 – Be Clever With Your Cash
What you need to know about car finance mis-selling compensation – Which
Lifetime ISA rates on cash reach nearly 5% – This Is Money
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Should you pay for your funeral now? – Which
The British cities where buying a home is cheaper than renting – This Is Money
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Is Monzo Billsback worth it? – Be Clever With Your Cash
NatWest launches top 4.2% one-year cash ISA – This Is Money
Robinhood takes aim at UK investment platforms with no-fee ISA [Paywall] – FT
Homes for sale near botanic gardens, in pictures – Guardian
Comment and opinion
How free stuff from Amazon almost ruined retirement – Mr Money Mustache
Can the stock market predict the future? – A Wealth of Common Sense
When it comes to bonds, don’t be a hero – Morningstar
What’s more important than a safe withdrawal rate? – The Retirement Manifesto
Founders and VCs weigh in on the UK’s ambition deficit – CNBC
Morgan Housel: passive income is a scam [Podcast] – The Diary of a CEO
Why do people get paid to invest their money? – Noahpinion
Why a 37-year old on $390,000 at Google quit her job with nothing lined up – CNBC
Making things worse mini-special
Brown-stage capitalism – The American Prospect
Thinking of AI as a social problem – How Things Work
Naughty corner: Active antics
Go small for the maximum bang from factors such as value and profitability – Verdad
The high cost of managerial hypocrisy – Flyover Stocks
Lenders ‘extend and pretend’ as commercial property values drop – Financial Times
The US is really two economies in one – Klement on Investing
National Grid is an attractive income play – Interactive Investor [Affiliate link]
Maximum diversification beats market timing [Research] – via Springer
Gold mini-special
So you want to talk about gold – FT
Ingots we trust – Paul Krugman
Kindle book bargains
Narconomics: How to Run a Drug Cartel by Tom Wainwright – £0.99 on Kindle
Great Britain? by Torsten Bell – £0.99 on Kindle
Supremacy: AI, ChatGPT by Pammy Olson – £0.99 on Kindle
Chokepoints: Economic Warfare by Edward Fishman – £0.99 on Kindle
Or pick up one of the all-time great investing classics – Monevator shop
Environmental factors
Global renewable energy generation surpasses coal for first time – Guardian
Thousands in biggest-ever UK environmental lawsuit on Wye river pollution – BBC
The growing benefits of climate adaption – Klement on Investing
Green turtle bounces back from brink in conservation win – BBC
UK plastic waste exports to developing countries rose 84% in a year – Guardian
Robot overlord roundup
How AI became our personal assistant [Neat graphics] – FT
Let’s talk about AI art – The Oatmeal
AI hyper-scaler maths doesn’t add up, and they know it… – Praetorian Capital
…call it the rising tide strategy – Spyglass
A 23-year old AI pundit running a $1.5bn hedge fund [Bubble, much?] – Fortune
The way to save your children from AI is to invest in AI – Financial Samurai
Marina Hyde: if Sam Altman is the future, can we go backwards? – Guardian
Not at the dinner table
Voters are not listening to Labour – Prospect
Who maintains the scaffolding of freedom? – Shruti Rajagopalan
Declining American democracy – Paul Krugman
Off our beat
On turning 40 – More To That
FIFA’s 2026 World Cup ticket scheme is a late-capitalist hellscape – Guardian
Tech billionaires are doom prepping. Should we be worried? – BBC
Milan lures global elite, especially from London – Wall Street Journal
We are different from all other humans in history – The Garden of Forking Paths
Ten insights from ten years of transformational conversations – The Leading Edge
Lessons from a dog that saved a life – Two Percent [h/t Abnormal Returns]
And finally…
“Personally what has been the most important [lesson] was to understand the value of time – and this is something that has come from observing [Buffett], learning his story and that time compounds.”
– Alice Schroeder, The Snowball
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You nailed it as usual – it’s all just so tedious
Love the despairing satire of the FT gold post. Probably funny to all of about 500 people in the country. Reads like the writer’s last day.
If you are going to say BTC has a place in sensible portfolios you should back it up with a reason. My opinion as always is that it has no place, especially with the ridiculous ongoing charade of Tether printing a billion USDT (backed by assets, no audit, trust me bro) once or twice a week to prop up the market.
HL stated their view this week “ The HL Investment view is that bitcoin is not an asset class, and we do not think cryptocurrency has characteristics that mean it should be included in portfolios for growth or income,” the firm said.
https://www.cnbc.com/2025/10/10/uk-investment-platform-warns-traders-to-avoid-bitcoin-crypto.html
Your last paragraph re hell bent on confusion, sums up the aspect of this government that I dislike the most and I believe shows many of them to be out of their depth wrt running the economy. Stamp duty, council tax, tax free lump sum for the public and/or NI changes for business what next – this shows very poor leadership by labour. How to stagnate whole sections of the economy through misinformation just seems idiotic
@marc1485153 — Read the article I linked to. I can’t rewrite everything every time unfortunately! (Of course you’re still at liberty to disagree, reasonable people etc).
Also my statement doesn’t say a portfolio has to have BTC to be sensible. It says it can be sensible while having BTC. 🙂
@all — Cheers for thoughts! On the move today so limited commenting time but will be moderating on the mobile as per.
I enjoyed the HL statement, they were definitely not on the fence with their view on BTC ETNs.
They also say “Despite our investment view, we recognise that some clients will wish to speculate with cryptocurrency ETNs.”
and “Clients will have to undertake an appropriateness assessment before being allowed to invest”
and “ HL will offer appropriate clients to trade in cryptocurrency ETNs early next year following careful development of the client journey and appropriateness assessment.‘
The direct link to their statement
https://www.hl.co.uk/investment-services/crypto-statement
@TI I couldn’t agree more, or have put it better myself.
@sundrycryptohaters The point here is not crypto, good or bad, it is the sclerotic nature of decision making in our regulatory system – and I say this as someone who spent 7 mainly happy years working at the FSA/FCA. Don’t un-ban an asset class while at the same time making it impossible to invest in it!
On the Hargreaves Lansdown piece specifically, they say that it is impossible to analyse performance assumptions for crypto, and that it has no intrinsic value. Fair enough, I recognise that as a legitimate point of view. I’m sure HL are entirely consistent in their advice to investors and make exactly the same point about gold … let me check … oh, how strange!
https://www.hl.co.uk/news/is-now-a-good-time-to-invest-in-gold-plus-2-investment-ideas
https://www.hl.co.uk/free-guides/what-is-the-best-way-to-invest-in-gold
After Woodford, can we take anything which HL say at all seriously?
Can’t buy the Gold/BTC risk parity ‘BOLD’ Swiss listed ETF. Hey ho.
As MSTR / Strategy moves ever closer to a discount – whilst still (more or less) seemingly maintaining its price due to an ever higher BTC / Satoshi count per share – perhaps that might become an (operationally levered of sorts) alternative to this maybe / maybe not platform stance towards a straight forward BTC tracker ETF.
That White Heat speech was a banger. 1st October ’63. Just up the road in Scarborough. Rings as true today as then in this era of AI.
Thanks @TI, excellent as usual. Become rather disillusioned with Morningstar recently but the bond article is very good. Not tempted by crypto, ETN or otherwise – seems the only way to invest as opposed to gamble is to be part of Trump’s insider trading ring. Maybe giving him a Nobel gong to play with might have distracted him from economic disruptions for a bit!
On the contrary to other comments here, I phoned HL on Wednesday and told them in no uncertain terms what I am considering doing with my not inconsiderable sum of capital I, and my family have there, if they don’t let people make their own ******* decisions.
To HL and the FCA – we don’t need protection. **** off. I don’t need their opinion either. I hold sheltered wrappers that I should be able to stick what the **** I want in. I’ll caveat that and say ‘provided it meets regs’, but even that should be looser given the number of instruments they have ‘prevented for my safety’ from me buying that would have been spectacular.
They did this the the FCA banned buying the ETN’s the first time, and enforced it before the rule came in place, and now they have the temerity to tell me I don’t know what’s good for me, again?
Meanwhile I can happily buy stocks that sometimes go bust there? Or TSLA which has not dissimilar volatility?
There is no logic to this.
Re the proposed changes to house buying: moving to a system closer to Scotland’s is definitely a good move. But it’s very frustrating to hear Labour touting £100s in savings for FTBs when their stamp duty changes are costing us £1000s as FTBs in London. Also is it any surprise voters aren’t listening to Labour when the PM has no vision and no charisma?
I really don’t understand the end game with the AI expenditure by these big tech companies? My assumption is that the tech companies are all hoping to be the first to develop an AGI – but that does not seem to be achievable using LLMs. Great article by Precap and similar to another I read a while back that estimated AI-related expenditure so far at over half a trillion dollars by tech companies for essentially no profit.
The Mr Money Mustache article is as disappointing as all his articles have been in the last 3-4 years. Especially as discovering his website in 2016/17 started me on the path to FIRE to begin with. The low-consumption / environmental aspect of FIRE (e.g., Early Retirement Extreme) doesn’t really seem to be a fixture of the diminishing FIRE community any more.
@Moggers #10: sounds like you’ve gotten yourself a market timing mechanism there to go with the ‘inverse Cramer’ (do the opposite) and the (never failed once on a 1 year later view) CNBC ‘Markets in Turmoil’ special (bottom in, start buying): Have 2 sets of accounts – 1 (ISA/SIPP) with IBkr (or maybe AJB) and a smaller 1 (GIA) at HL: when HL try and ban or impede you buying then go long the thing in question in IBkr/AJB account(s). When HL try and encourage you to buy (as with Woodford) then short it / it’s underlying holdings in IBkr. I am joking of course (never short anything IMO, as negative asymmetry); but it’s astonishing just how consistently wrong HL prove to be about just about everything (inspiration below):
https://bwlegacy.com/content/markets-in-turmoil-a-positive-indicator
I’m also extremely disappointed with HL’s position – I don’t want my broker to tell me what to invest in or not, I just want them to let me buy things.
Sure there are risks but being able to tax shelter such a volatile asset seems extremely valuable to me.
HL are going to make the BTC ETN available, but they are right to call it out for what it is.
HL warning against crpyto seems pretty prudent. There is a rapidly growing segment of retail investors who seem to think that when they lose money somebody else is responsible. I doubt HL cares what happens to their clients’ trades. They should care about those clients suing them. Anything HL can do to warn against that risk now, will help them later.
The FCA, however, is a different creature. It has zero credibility when deciding what is risky or not. I mean this is the body that that decided it was just fine for retail to invest, via P2P lending bucket shops, in sub-ordinated property development loans that were so toxic that no other lender would touch them. The FCA thought it was just fine for the lender to get just 12% of the 30% the borrower was paying. ‘Cos were no fees right? Even if it defaulted, how could the lender lose money. It was secured by property at 60-70%, right? Umm, well they did, and rather a lot. They even created “Innovative Finance” ISAs for garbage like this.
Just before the weekend, the US president threw another tantrum and threatened to impose 100% tariffs on China. The immediate result for my global index trackers was about -1.7 %. Bitcoin dropped about 10% as I recall. Pretty much summarises why I avoid anything associated with crypto.
@ZX (15) . On P2P, I actually did OK with one of them, Ratesetter, over several years. Never had any problems, no defaults. I did exit when they got themselves in a mess to do with, not property, but some dodgy car loan outfit that they’d loaned to/had to take over.
The FCA. Just thinking back over lots of years, I seem to recall that the attitudes of successive governments was that people who worked for the FCA and it’s predecessors should not be paid too much. And that regulation should not be too onerous, so to speak. Hence you got the scenario in, for example, ‘The Big Short’, where an employee of the US regulator is seen touting herself to earn the big bucks with an investment bank.
@marc1485…
> we do not think cryptocurrency has characteristics that mean it should be included in portfolios for growth or income,
You can say exactly the same thing about gold. And yet I hold two gold ETFs with HL. All they seem to check for that is do you have a pulse.
@FI with No Name w.r.t. MMM
That’s the trouble when you take the King’s shilling. MMM is worth far more than me. But he needs to monetise his blog, not because he would be out on the street without the money, but because money has a power of itself and that can make you do things . It makes you do things you otherwise wouldn’t. Like spend too many of your reducing number of hours on earth working less than minimum wage because: gamification
I liked the honesty of how he came to his senses again though. Who among us can honestly say we’ve never done something stupid because it seemed a good idea at the time 😉
Innovative ISAs gave credibility to some very dodgy property based loans (look at ‘The House Crowd’) where investors were so far down the pecking order they faced a total loss despite the loans supposedly being asset backed (land plus building in progress). Some relatives fell for this spiel and lost the lot when the schemes went bust.
Junk bond ETFs were about 100x safer for a similar yield. Talk about uncompensated risk, there was very limited upside for unlimited downside.
@SemiPassive: You write:
I think this is the crux of the disagreement here. You — and evidently many other people, including your relatives — think that the ISA status is an imprimatur of financial fitness or similar.
I think that ISA status means that investment gains and income will be tax-free, should any come my way. Not much more.
Unfortunately your relatives apparently made a bad fist of assessing the risks of these investments. But the fact that they were in an Innovative Finance ISA shouldn’t be among the indicators.
We’ve gone far too far down this road already. The more people abscond responsibility for their investments, the more restrictions we’ll face in the future.
Going further down the road won’t even stop people claiming they were ‘misled’ or ‘missold’ — see the moaning about lifestyle pensions a couple of years ago when bonds sold off — but it will steadily reduce the investment options for those of us who’d like to decide what we’re doing and not have to give our money to advisors or pick from a restricted range of products.
Of course this doesn’t mean anything goes. Frauds should be exposed. Misleading claims should be outed. Illegal investments should be illegal.
But I am wary of this drift towards technical wrappers supposedly giving ‘credibility’.
Indeed by restricting products from ISAs the FCA actually amplifies this perception, for no good end I’d suggest.
Clearly there’s an issue in that people are increasingly having to take control of their finances, and with that comes a burden that’s too high for many people, for whatever reason.
And of course we can all mistakes on any particular investment.
One solution might be to allow some people to certify as ‘sophisticated’ (as needed for say crowdfunding) and if they do then anything goes and on their head be it, and everyone else gets vanilla products I suppose.
Another option would be some kind of genuine state-backed and limited range of investment products, which would give the credibility your relatives seek.
But in practice I still think that markets would crash and people would complain. So you’d probably be looking at NS&I type products, plus some kind of sub-optimal buffered and otherwise de-risked global tracker fund at best?
Government backed investment products? Hell no. You can’t possibly be serious @The Investor?!
Here’s how that will play out in the real world:
1. Government launches these products.
2. Government plasters big “can go up as well as down” warnings all over them.
3. Crash duly arrives and everything tanks.
4. Clamour from the left for “poor widows and orphans” to have their investments bailed out at (vast) taxpayer expense.
No thanks. We need to stop thinking of the government as being there to bail every special interest out from their own decisions.
And before anyone says anything, I include in that the banks and everything else that has been bailed out over the last … ohhh … 17 years.
I know the authors of this fine website reach for the comfort blanket of “Brexit” to explain away all of the UK’s travails, but the sad reality is, even if it has led to a reduction in the size of the economy over a 10 or whatever year period, and even assuming the most outrageous “guesstimate” for what that amount might be, Brexit and whatever costs it may have incurred is but a (pardon the expression) fart in the wind when set against almost 2 decades of ZIRP, QE, mass bailouts of anything and everything and, going further back, incompetent and spendthrift government (central, devolved and local), an overly complex and high tax system, a planning system not fit for purpose and a regulatory system which, far from being “on watch” seems to have had a “the other lot are looking after that” attitude which later led to pass the parcel on blame. To say nothing of the proliferation of a whole host of “independant” bodies (i.e. “unaccountable”) more interested in empire building than improving the lot of either the people or the country. That’s before we even get to the massive liabilities for PFI and unfunded public sector pensions.
And the current government want to continue on a tax, borrow and spend binge, when the interest bill alone on outstanding government debt is more than we spend educating the next generation or defending the realm. Talk about messed up.
Not helped by all those who think that this doesn’t matter because the government (ironically because of Brexit!) still has control of the currency and can “print its way” out of any problems, and pithy sayings like “you can’t compare a country’s finances to a households”.
YES YOU F***ING CAN!! Too much spending = interest payments gobbling up all the free cash = no money for anything else. That holds true for governments and households.
It holds especially true when ~ 25% of your public debt is indexed linked and held by foreign entities. It also holds true for countries like the UK who don’t make so much any more and have to import anything. Guess what happens to the cost of all those imports when you debauch the currency in an attempt to prove that MMT is not just some acid laced opium pipe dream?!
The UK Government has (with the single possible exception of Rolls Royce when it was briefly nationalised and then returned to the market) shown that it is singularly incapable of managing or making genuine investments, and seems to confuse spending with investment.
That’s also why in Norway, they have strict rules about only 3 or 4% of the income from their sovereign wealth fund being available for the government to spend, as otherwise, their governments would have that > $1 Trillion dollar fund spaffed up the wall faster than you can say “bribing your client base”.
In reply to TI, I don’t think ISAs should be used to wrap literally any kind of investment. There should be some kind of transparency and standards. Personally I’m content with what Stocks and Shares ISAs offer, largely pretty liquid exchange traded assets, some of which may require questionaires to be completed if the risks are complex or not immediately apparent (as you will see Hargreaves Lansdown doing for some investment trusts like TwentyFour Select Monthly Income or crypto).
I’m not sure peer to peer lending or crowdfunding should have had their own type of ISA invented in the first place, it must be a tiny % of ISAs overall.
And to be fair to my relatives they didn’t moan for a government bail out, and from what I could ascertain the risks were not fully apparent, not through naivety but because a new secured creditor got involved part way though construction.
I accept peer to peer lending can be less risky if you diversify into multiple loans to different people.
And maybe credibility was not quite the right word to use (perhaps legitimacy), but providers were certainly playing on the term ISA in their marketing bumpf.
@Dragon — No no, you and I are much more of the same mind. 🙂
I want to be allowed to do what I want with my money. I’m just saying the logical endpoint of ‘government approved’ or ‘state managed tax wrapper’ equalling (hypothetically) ‘quality stamp of approval from the powers that be’ is that the powers-that-be would have to radically reduce what products they genuinely approved, possibly to the point of actually managing them.
I agree there’s no need for that. Caveat emptor is due for a comeback.
@SemiPassive — I don’t see why any legal and generally regulator-approved investment shouldn’t be wrappable in an ISA, in principle. (Perhaps a buy-to-let say is tricky admin wise, though even that should be solvable).
Why not? Why shouldn’t these investments be fungible from a tax perspective? The existing distinctions are pretty arbitrary, especially for as long as you can put the vast majority of listed stocks in an ISA. Given that, anything should really go. There are far riskier things you can buy on the LSE than a P2P loan would be…!
Fair play to your relatives. I seem to remember the terms changing with one of those property platform collapses, yes. (I never used them, though I did do a very high interest property loan investment via a mini bond, if you remember those. It did fine, although sadly I was repaid early when the issuer was acquired. But of course that’s no more evidential than your example to the contrary. 🙂 )