LM portfolio as at 23/10/2026:
| Code | Sector | Date Bought | Cost | Value | Gain/Loss |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| LM114 LM114-2 LM114-3 |
Retailers | 09/06/2026 06/07/2026 27/08/2026 |
£5050 | £5830 | 15.45% |
| LM122 | Closed End Investments | 06/07/2026 | £1760 | £1790 | (1.53%) |
| LM123 | Non-life Insurance | 07/07/2026 | £1760 | £1710 | (3.19%) |
| LM124 | Life Insurance | 07/07/2026 | £1770 | £1880 | 6.39% |
| LM126 | Chemicals | 03/08/2026 | £1790 | £1960 | 9.71% |
| LM127 | Industrial Support Services | 07/09/2026 | £1770 | £1770 | (0.04%) |
| LM128 | Closed End Investments | 23/09/2026 | £1760 | £1740 | (1.05%) |
| LM129 | Construction and Materials | 23/09/2026 | £1770 | £1740 | (1.73%) |
| LM130 | Travel and Leisure | 14/10/2026 | £1770 | £1630 | (7.81%) |
| LM131 | Oil, Gas and Coal | 19/10/2026 | £1770 | £1760 | (0.26%) |
My secret weapon in automated money-making has been nullified and I'm pretty gutted.
This is the bot that places each way bets on horse-racing for me. I discovered last week the software is being phased out - the developer informed me that I won't be able to renew my licenses any further.
I had one licence that ran out this month but when I asked him for the payment link he quickly replied to say that he's closing the system down and renewals aren't possible.
So I'm down to one instance of it that is paid up until July 2027.
I worry now that he may not issue any updates and that will affect the performance of the software. Bookies often redesign their sites and sometimes when this happens the bot needs to be updated so it can still place bets. With no more money coming in the developer has no real incentive to fix any problems.
What a pain.
For a couple of years I have had two different laptops sat in friends' houses with a licence on each. I'd remote into the laptops and then set the software to run each day from around 10am. Sometimes I wouldn't be able to shut it down at night and it would stay online all night, randomly placing bets at 3am. The bookies probably thought I was an insomniac gambling addict.
I know a thing or two about IT so I had reconfigured the routers in my friends' houses to allow me to use free tools and built-in settings to log on remotely to the laptops.
However, I would also pay for some specialist software as a failsafe in case anything happened to the router - i.e. it got replaced without me knowing or the owner reset it to factory default for some reason - usually because some clueless "support technician" from their ISP told them to do it.
This backup software, RealVNC, wanted £111 for me to renew for a year. More than I felt was reasonable to pay for something that, although it could be installed on up to 50 computers, only allowed me to access one workstation at a time. I found another solution which allowed up to 10 devices but would also let me access all 10 at the same time.
I signed up for a 7 day trial and on day 2 of the trial they sent me an email offering me a year's membership for less than £10. Had they waited a couple of days I was going to pay them £140 or so for 2 years.
Oh well, it means I have saved £100+ and I'm covered until October 2027. Result.
My plan now is to run the software on the one remaining laptop until it stops working or my mate gets banned from all the bookies "he" uses. Then I will use all the profit to blast through any sports betting or casino bonus offers I can find before splitting the gains with these friends who were trusting enough to let me use their details - and their broadband connections - to open bookie accounts.
After that I guess I'll need to find some more trusting friends who want to make a little extra money.
The Portfolio
There's little to smile about with regards to the LISA this year.
January started really well with the FTSE 100 blasting over 10,000 in the first few days but since then I've opened a lot of positions then closed them again banking small losses most of the time.
Even worse are some of the bigger positions I had built up which I ended up closing after they rolled over and gave back much of the lovely profits I saw at various points over the past few months.
It means I have: (a) a lot of cash sat in my account, (b) some positions that aren't really moving and (c) few options on what I can buy. Though the FTSE 250 is still over its 200 day SMA I'm not over-burdened with new possibilities. Especially annoying as I was hoping to make the most of any "Santa Rally" this year.
I really wanted to be a lot further along the journey to a million by now. A balance in the £40k range at least but the fund seems stuck in the mid-to-late 30s.
The memory of removing lots of money from the LISA when I was unemployed will always sting but needs must sometimes. I'm almost back at the same level of "paid in" funds now, less than 2 years later and I have the added bonus of a separate SIPP which my company has been paying into and is sat with the same provider as the LISA.
Dealing with Debt - Second Attempt (or is it the Third?)
My main focus now, and for the next 12 months or so, is to pay off and get rid of my credit card debt then build up a substantial emergency fund of around 6 months' expenses.
Just like all the bad guys in wrestling used to promise to rid the world of Hulkamania "once and for all", I want to do the same with these credit cards. ONCE AND FOR ALL.
Yes, none of them attract any interest so they aren't growing and no, I'm not going to need to add anything to them in the near future. I have a small but reasonable emergency fund of £2,700 that I'll keep to one side and anything else spare is getting thrown at the debt.
Here's the balance of each as of 26th October 2026:
| M&S | £3,816.22 |
| Natwest | £4,494.99 |
| Santander | £5,808.82 |
| Virgin | £166.46 |
These balances are down a little bit since the beginning of the month when I decided to dive back in to serious debt repayment again. Initial payments have come from Betfair and eBay. Football trades early on in the season had been a mixed bag and I lost interest in it. I withdrew some of the balance, leaving £50 in there, and paying the remainder off the Santander card. In addition, I got a buyer on some old eBay listings and he went on a little spending spree with me. He's paid for two of the items and I've already paid that money off my Santander card whilst I wait for him to pay for the third one he bought.
The Virgin card will be at zero by the end of the month and I don't plan on using it again for some time. It's a Virgin Atlantic card and the only reason I still have it is to book holiday-related stuff on it for the points. Any balance put on this card should be immediately paid off with the equivalent in cash - if this were a perfect world. Frankly I'd rather get rid of the thing forever because I don't think points are worth anything.
My lovely wife is convinced that we can get lots of perks using these points as she sees all these Disney vloggers on Youtube insisting that they get upgrades galore simply by using a Virgin card for all spending but I'm yet to be convinced. I think a lot of them are full of frosty.
The one time I did try and use the points I'd collected - something in the region of 25k - I spent two hours on the phone with a clueless Virgin call centre employee before giving up and rueing the fact I'd wasted so much of my precious life in frustration. Dave Ramsay might be a complete BERK - firing a pregnant employee simply because she was pregnant, and he 100% did that - but I agree with his stance on credit card points.
No-one ever got rich from credit card points. It is true that you can get "rewards" from them but the value of the points gets reduced all the time to the point where it's easier just to pay for the upgrades. You can spend hours and hours doing the admin required and then end up merely saving a tiny bit on some mediocre flights which are, let's face it, just a means to an end. If you want to go to Orlando then you need to put up with Virgin Atlantic and pay the increasingly large tickets prices. But I'm done with their needlessly complicated points system.