OT my new premium bonds

It'll be £25. Anything more is rare. How much have you invested? Don't expect another for a while.

which is £15 ....

I don't get it the wife has her stash with The Natiowide and she is getting loads compaired to that ....hundreds

Last year a bond entering the draw for the first time won the million pound prize. There have always been rumours that premium bond 'wins' are how the UK government spooks departments pay their informants.

I had a £25 win this month. Nothing for the last 2 months.

I had 6 at £25 in May last year, not long after I had sold 2/3rd of my holdings and bought new bonds.

I have always suspected that new bonds of a substantial amount get preferential treatmenst for 2 years and then the prize stream dwindles noticibly. Other people have noticed this too.

I bought £10k in October and got £50 on my first draw in November, another £25 now in February.

Why do people bother with cash ISAs ?. Even prior to 2020 they had a worse interest rate than a normal deposit account. Now that you get interest paid gross and you can earn £1000 from savings (£500 for higher rate taxpayers) a cash ISA is nonsense. If you had more than £20,000 though it would be much more sensible to convert it to a share ISA because the annual limit for adding to a share ISA is £20K. Then put it in a global investment trust or fund. DYOR carefully !, though you won't go far wrong with funds from Vanguard. Just watch out for platform charges which vary enormously.

But if true, wouldn't that amount to fraud, given that they are advertised as being completely random. It seems an unlikely way for NS&I to act, given that it is testable.

I bought £10K of a certain fund in October. It's currently worth £13,000

F*ck premium bonds

COVID and Brexit making me a decent living...shame I didn't sell my oil shares

you gamble then ?...

Encashed PB's will be in your bank account in 3 Wdays of you do it online, so it's a convenient place to stash some cash that you know you will need access to at some point and quite quickly, by which time you might have won something.

You would have more than doubled your money by buying Baillie Gifford funds and IT's in Late march or April. Even if you bought them in Feb 2020 you would still be up.

Not if he sat on oil shares while they fell off a cliff.

Often the drop off in winnings is down to an interest cut so fewer £25 prizes to give out. This has been happening for a decade or more in line with other cash savings products. It's nothing to do with this mythical new bonds give more prizes.

Late last year NS&I cut the interest rates on all their products including premium bonds, albeit the premium bonds are still relatively competitive with many other cash type investments. Most of the other NS&I products went from 1%+ interest to near zero (0.05%).

The prize fund is currently 1% so £10K would generate £100 a year in prizes. On average, you could "win" a single prize approx every 3.5 months, which could be the million rather than £25. Prizes are tax free.

It is only a perception. When my late wife and I both put money into PBs, we seemed to get more wins in the first couple of years compared to subsequently. But I never tabulated the numbers/dates, so the evidence is shaky at best.

There's a fairly complicated analysis somewhere, but IIRC the upshot is that a person with average luck and with the maximum £50k of bonds should expect about 0.95% return in a year. With £10k that falls to 0.75%.

The main reason seems to be that the big prizes are very rare - eg the £1M prizes are fifty billion to one.

Here it is...