The stock market is a knockout investment in the long term – but is that enough?

There used to be a game show on TV called It’s a Knockout, where amongst lots of other silly games, contestants – wearing daft costumes that made walking difficult – used to carry buckets of water across a slippery surface whilst being bombarded with water cannons or sandbags, to try and fill a receptacle at the end of the course.

Obviously, they spilt a lot along the way and were occasionally wiped out altogether and had to start again. But there’s no doubt that if they were dogged enough and did it for long enough, eventually they would fill the receptacle.

This often seems to me to be a good analogy for the stock market.

The award-winning financial advice website, “This Is Money” ran an analysis last year confirming much the same. If you’d invested over any ten year period over the last two decades (except two dodgy phases in the dotcom boom and the financial crash), you were 95% likely to turn a profit. And assuming you reinvested your profits, the average return generated would have been 70%!

Sounds like investment Nirvana, doesn’t it?

But let’s examine those figures a little more closely.

And – for now – we’ll set aside those periods of heart-in-mouth panic as you watch your stock slide and gnaw your fingernails away as you decide whether or not to leave your investments where they are. That’s all part of stock investing, seasoned veterans will tell you. Take your lumps like you take your jumps.

If we accept that you’ve ridden the roller-coaster, pushed your ticker back down to its rightful position each time the market bounced it up into your throat, fought against all your instincts to reinvest hard-earned profit back into the maelstrom from whence you’ve just extracted it…what are you left with?

A 70% profit over 10 years! Sounds like a lot if you consider that if you’d started with £100,000, you’d now be sitting on £170,000.

But over 10 years? If we spread that out on an annual basis and apply a little simple compounding, it amounts to just 5.45% per year. Is that a fair recompense for all the cardiac distress?

So is there an alternative? Property?  Well, it’s more secure, but again, it ties up your capital for years.

So if you could make an annualised return of three times that amount without all the turmoil and without the long-term capital handcuffs, wouldn’t you consider it? Heck, wouldn’t you even do it for twice that average stock market return?

That’s why smart investors have started looking at loan-based crowdfunding of property. Lending to screened-and-approved developers looking for investment to get their projects off the ground. Usually, they’ll have agreed bank funding for around 60% of the building cost and they’ll have their own equity to sink into it too. But the capital gap in between is increasingly being filled by crowdfunders on the FCA-authorised CapitalStackers platform.

And it can be impressively lucrative. Recent investors in a CapitalStackers funded development in York made annualised returns of up to 22.5% in just eight months.

More typically, investors in two current CapitalStackers deals are set to make annualised returns of between 10% and 17%. Those figures look even more attractive when you know that all CapitalStackers investors are able to choose their own return, predicated on the level of capital risk they’re prepared to take (although the risk itself is not terribly off-putting, given that the investment is secured on the property, the developer’s equity/profit is there to cushion any drop in value – and the Loan-to-Value on these deals is within a sensible range of 55% to 72%).

So how might this kind of investment compare with the stock market?

Well, taking a mid-point CapitalStackers investment as an example: If you were to start with £100,000 – on an agreed return of 13.5% – after one year, your nest egg would be worth £113,500.

After two years, you’d have £128,822.

Impressively, you’d have overtaken your stock market earnings in just over four years, and after ten years you’d be sitting pretty on £354,780. Which makes those nerve-wracked stock market investors with their £170,000 look like dabbling amateurs.

As with shares, you don’t need a huge amount to get started. The minimum investment in a CapitalStackers scheme is just £5,000 – but many invest a lot more.

And considering you can access your capital by selling your investment on the secondary market, it’s no wonder more and more of the smart money is moving to loan-based property crowdfunding.

Find out more at www.capitalstackers.com or
by calling 
Steve Robson on 07774 718947
or Sylvia Bowden on 07464 806477
or Tony Goldrick on 07788 373126.