My ETFs for H2 2025

We are now 6 months into 2025 and it is looking like Trump's devastating tariffs and his 'Big Beautiful Bill' is not going to be allowed to go ahead in it's entirety.

It may be that now is a good time to invest some spare cash that I may hold because it is looking like 'play time' will soon be over and the grown-ups will start to take charge of the USA soon.

The usual stock advice is to just invest into the S&P 500, but this advice would have meant your investments since 1 Jan 2025 would now be down by -5% :-(

The blue line shows the S&P 500 Year-to-date

The ETFs that have done well are Financial, NASDAQ (recovered) and Communications. I would expect the 2nd half of 2025 to see bigger gains in Technology now.

So the ETFs I prefer for H2 2025 are:

All world Global:  SWDA (I prefer HMWS which has a lower TER charge)

Global Financial:  XWFS (performed well in H1 and spending in defence should continue in H2)

Tech:                         XLKQ (USA based synthetic showing better returns that IITU or global XXTW)

Comms:                    IUCM  (USA based - Meta, Google, Netflix, AT&T, Disney, etc.) or XSSW for global ETF

Instead of XLKQ+IUCM you could go for NASDAQ EQGB.

The proportions you choose (HMWS/XLKQ/XWFS/IUCM or HMWS/EQGB/XWFS) are up to you. 

HMWS has shown 75% gain over 5 years (S&P 500 CSP1 87%) and is less volatile than Tech (e.g. IITU or XLKQ) which returned a YTD loss of 5% (XLKQ 160% in 5 yrs).

The S&P 500 has not performed very well in H1 2025, but may well recover in H2 2025.

Personally, I hold HMWS/XLKQ/XWFS/IUCM and EQGB and add into one or two of these when I think their price has reached a low point. Because I have both taxable and tax-free (ISA and SIPP) trading accounts, I invest and hold these ETFs inside my taxable account but I trade other stocks more frequently inside my tax-free (ISA) account so as not to incur capital gains tax when crystallising gains. I try to use my taxable account for long term ETFs/stocks. Approx. 10% of my funds are used for short term trading of more volatile shares where I try to 'beat the market' - but I often fail!

My foolish 'beat-the-market' trades

If you are interested, I also use approx 10% of my capital to try to beat the market. Over the years, I have had some successes but have found that just one or two heavy losses can really damage the overall performance. For most of these volatile stocks, I set a sell limit at -20%. Even if they bounce back later, I don't mind because it only takes one stock to go to down -80% or more to make the whole of my 'high risk' portfolio a failure!

I invest in individual company shares and also 'special' ETFs which can go short or long by x2 or x3.

I opened and funded a new Trading 212 ISA account with £20k in April 2025 which is now valued at £21,400 (approx 7.5% IRR with £3k still held as cash). Some of my current holdings in this T212 account are shown below (these were bought at various times after April 6th up to early June):

Some short-term risky trades/holdings you might find interesting are:

ALTBG - Bitcoin company showing massive gains over 100% in 30 days!

DFND    - Defence ETF (Rolls Royce is also in defence)

3LBA     - BA systems x3 long (BA have UK defence contracts)

3USL     - S&P 500 x3 long ETF

QQQ3   - NASDAQ x3 long ETF

These are very risky (especially the x3 ones) and I watch them closely every hour! I have also bought x3 Tesla (see previous article!) and made a nice profit within a week!

Note: Buying BOWL was a tragic buy for me - a few days after buying it, they released new performance figures and their price fell by over 10% in a day. However, they have a profitable indoors business but it may not perform too well if the UK weather remains hot and sunny this summer as predicted and people stay outdoors. I have also bought shares in the pub chain Wetherspoons which should do well if the summer is hot and sunny and I will look to sell when it peaks. I will add more BOWL in anticipation of the shares rising come Q4 2025.

These investments (gambles!) are just for fun, over £10K in this ISA portfolio is in HMWS/GOOG/EQGB and 90% of all my other portfolios are mostly in the four or five ETFs mentioned at the start of this article. The main portfolio has only just recovered and has now broken even over the last 6 months.

What do you think of this approach?

Note: The above is not financial advice advice - please do your own research. Your financial situation will be different from mine.

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