BT (BT) - All you need to know
Ways to invest in BT
You can start straight away by signing up with an online broker and buying some shares. This is often the easiest way to get started, as many brokers come with demo accounts and tutorials to help a beginner learn about the market.
Once you understand more, there are other options available to you as well. There are lots of funds and trusts that hold BT shares you can buy by adding your money to the pool to get a piece of the action. The links below take you to individual pages which tell you more about all the different options.
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What is BT?
BT is the largest telecommunications company in the UK. Formerly a state-owned telecoms provider, it’s been entirely public since the mid 1990s. Now, BT offers telephone, broadband, and mobile services across the UK.
We advise everyone to start slow and with a long term focus. Take our long term stock investing course to learn the basics of what you should look out for in a company and how to assess its performance.
How to invest in BT
The most basic way is to use a broker to get some shares, but there are lots of other ways to invest in BT stock as well. Below, you’ll find a list of the top ones and you can learn even more by following the links that offer more detail on each.
- Stock brokers. An online broker is the best place to get shares. You can sign up and deposit money in just a few clicks and many brokers offer research tools to help guide your investing decisions, a useful feature for beginners. We have reviewed all the leading stock platforms so you can pick one that works best for you.
- Mutual funds. A mutual fund is a pool of money contributed by lots of different people that’s managed by a professional. The mutual fund manager then takes that money and puts it in a variety of stocks, with the goal of making money for all of the fund’s investors.
- ETFs. Exchange-traded funds trade on the market like individual stocks, which makes them easy to deal with if you’re new to the market. But unlike individual stocks, an ETF is a tracker that follows the performance of a group of companies by owning shares in all of them. The big advantage of an ETF is that it gives you exposure to many different stocks at once, often within the framework of a certain industry or economic sector. Using an ETF allows you to spread out your risk while still maintaining your goal of owning a particular business.
- CFDs. Contracts for difference trading are a method of speculating on a company’s performance without owning its shares outright. CFDs tend to be in the realm of short term day traders, who want to jump in and out of positions quickly to benefit from small changes in price. A CFD is an agreement between a buyer and a seller, in which the former agrees to pay the latter the difference between the current value of an asset (in this case shares of BT) and the value of that asset on the contract’s stipulated date.
- Trusts. A trust is a closed-end investment method that’s a popular way for UK residents to start on the stock market. In many ways it’s very similar to a mutual fund or an ETF, except trusts have a fixed amount of money available to them, so the only way to gain access is to buy shares in the trust from somebody else.
- ISAs. An ISA is a tax-free savings or investment account for UK residents. You can put a certain amount of money each year in an ISA – the limit is £20,000 in the UK – and any shares you own with that money are tax-exempt. ISAs are simple to use and have no real downside, so it’s the best place to start from.
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