The annual bonus for investors: how to deploy a one-off windfall rather than a regular contribution

A bonus is best allocated by purpose rather than "invested" in one go: first pay off expensive debt and rebuild your cash reserve, then split the remainder by the time horizon on which you will actually need the money, and only after that choose an instrument. Separately, check the date the money is credited to your brokerage account: the tax outcome depends on which calendar year it falls into, and this is something that cannot be fixed retroactively.

A bonus is not a contribution: how the mechanics differ

A regular contribution works differently from a one-off inflow. When you buy a little every month, your entry price averages out on its own, not because this is a profitable strategy but because the purchases are spread over time. A bonus arrives all at once, and the whole amount gets a single entry price: whatever the market was on the day you bought. This is not an argument against investing a lump sum, but it is a reason not to treat a bonus as "the same money, just more of it".

The practical takeaway: a decision about a bonus is a decision about time horizon and portfolio weight, not about "what looks promising right now". If the bonus noticeably shifts your portfolio's structure towards a particular asset class, you are changing the portfolio's risk, even if you have picked a security you already know.

What to check before you open the trading terminal

Expensive consumer debt is the first claim on a bonus. Repaying a loan delivers a result that does not need forecasting: you simply stop paying interest. Market returns, by contrast, are promised by no one.

A cash reserve is the second. An investor without a reserve is forced to sell assets at the moment they need the money, not when it makes sense to sell; that is exactly how a long-term portfolio turns into a collection of losing trades.

The remainder can then be invested, and here the time horizon decides where you look. Money you will need on a clear horizon belongs in debt instruments, and above all in OFZ government bonds, where payment dates are known in advance. Money with no specific date of use belongs in equities or funds, if you do not intend to pick individual issuers.

A December bonus and the calendar year

Tax mechanisms are tied to the calendar year, not to the moment you "decided to invest". A contribution counts towards the year in which the money is actually credited to the account, so a bonus that arrives in the last days of December and a bonus credited in January fall into different reporting periods. The base on which the investment tax deduction is calculated is capped: 13%.

The legitimate ways to reduce your tax bill are covered separately in our guide to honest tax optimisation; it also shows where optimisation ends and a scheme the tax authority will not accept begins.

Dividends: check the calendar before you buy, not after

The temptation is understandable: the bonus is in hand and payouts are coming up. But buying a stock right before the record date does not create money out of thin air: after the cut-off the price opens adjusted for the upcoming payout, and the payout itself arrives later and already net of tax. It is worth understanding what an annual dividend is and how it relates to the share price before you trade.

The nearest dates are easy to check against the list of payouts:

The full picture is in dividends and the dividend calendar.

How to measure the result of an invested bonus

Not by the first year's result. A one-off inflow that happens to land on a good or a bad stretch of the market produces a figure from which nothing follows. A meaningful measure is the compound annual growth rate, that is, the growth rate averaged over time; it smooths out the randomness of the entry point.

If the bonus went into active trading rather than long-term investment, a different metric is more useful: the profit factor, the ratio of money made to money lost, with the caveat that it is easy to flatter by trimming the sample.

Crypto as a "one-off bet"

A bonus is often seen as spare money that you "can afford to risk", and this is a typical trigger for a first purchase of digital assets. For an investor without qualified status, a suitability test, a closed list of what is available and an annual limit all apply here; the details are in our piece on cryptocurrency for non-qualified investors.

What the platform does not know about you

The platform has no data on the size of your bonus, your tax rate, the make-up of your current portfolio or your investment horizon, so this article cannot give a specific allocation in money terms. Everything described here is a sequence of checks and a set of mechanics that do not depend on the amount. Definitions of contested terms are in the glossary, and the market backdrop is in the news.