How to Automate Your Investing | Irish Investors

  • By: Walter Dunphy ACCA
  • Date: February 13, 2023
  • Time to read: 3 min.

While we can all agree that there are huge benefits to putting your money to work by investing it. Not everybody is interested in spending half their waking hours analysing their investment portfolio and buying in and out of positions.

For those who just want to go with the ‘set and forget’ attitude towards investing, there are ways that you can completely automate the process.

The most important features that you will need from your broker to fully automate your investing are monthly standing orders and an automatic allocation of your funds to your selected stocks or ETFs.

There are two brokerages available to Irish investors that will allow you to do this, Trading 212 and BUX Zero.

BUX Zero Savings Plans

BUX Zero make it incredibly easy to completely automate your investing with their savings plans that also allow you to automate deposits.

You have the option of creating a savings plan for one individual stocks or ETFs such as the S&P 500.

BUX Zero also have some preset popular saving plans that follow groups of companies in industries such as the EV market, and renewables.

If you are unhappy with the preset selections, you also have the freedom to remove selections or add in additional stocks and edit the amount of capital you want to allocate to each one.

Trading 212 Pies

Trading 212 have a similar feature which they call their “Pies” which you can combine with their Autoinvest feature to make your investing almost robotic.

AutoInvest buys shares based on your pie’s targets. For example, if €100 are deposited into a pie of 5 slices each having a target of 20%, €20 pounds will go towards each slice.

You can decide how often deposits are made and how much you want to invest.

One cool added feature the Pies have is the ability to rebalance your Pie. Some stock make grow to become a bigger portion of your portolfio than you planned, and other loss making stocks will become a smaller percentage of your overall portfolio.

The rebalance feature will allow you to sell some winners, and buy more losers to reinstate the portfolio back to its original allocation rates.

Why Automate your investing?

Setting up standing order with your bank to routinely deposit money into your trading account which is automatically invested ensures that you get into the habit of saving and reduces the chances of you missing your savings targets by taking the responsibility out of your hands.

Consistently timing the market is nigh-on-impossible, but you can even out the market tops and the market bottoms by using a technique called dollar cost averaging, which is simply allocating a small bit of capital to the market at periodic times (weekly, fortnightly, monthly). This can be made even easier when you automate the whole process.

When you automate your investing you can completely remove the emotional bias. Investors are people and it is our nature to be make overly emotional decisions to the detriment of our portfolio returns. The stock market can even affect some peoples mental health, as their moods rise and fall depending on whether they are in the green or in the red.

Disclaimer: This blog post is for informational and educational purposes only and should not be construed as financial advice.

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