What's happened to my portfolio in the last 2 weeks?!

Thrugelmir

MadMat wrote: »

What I'd lime to know is why these dips never seem to coincide with HL's monthly savers DD date!

Mat

HL mark their prices up.

masonic

Thrugelmir wrote: »

Who sells the market and buys the market?

People who invest using trackers.

Glen_Clark

JohnRo wrote: »

UK100 is still 5% off the recent peaks over the last few months.

Jpn225 is the one that's rallied today.

The S&P 500 is at a record high.

System

I will freely admit that I get far too obsessive and mess around with my investments. I only own OEICs, but trade them like shares. Best thing a did a few months back was to transfer a large chunk off my platform into the fundsmith fund directly. Therefore can't easily mess around with it.

For the remainder on my platform, I sold my funds just as the slump was starting. A good move I thought. However I am still out of the market and missed the rally. My fundsmith fund however has ticked along nicely and the rally easily outweighed the correction.

It just goes to show you cannot time the market. The trouble of course is that I dare not buy back in right now as feel I would be asking for trouble!

Thrugelmir

Glen_Clark wrote: »

The S&P 500 is at a record high.

So is the amount of money that's slushing around looking for a home.

Ryan_Futuristics

teepee83 wrote: »

I will freely admit that I get far too obsessive and mess around with my investments. I only own OEICs, but trade them like shares. Best thing a did a few months back was to transfer a large chunk off my platform into the fundsmith fund directly. Therefore can't easily mess around with it.

For the remainder on my platform, I sold my funds just as the slump was starting. A good move I thought. However I am still out of the market and missed the rally. My fundsmith fund however has ticked along nicely and the rally easily outweighed the correction.

It just goes to show you cannot time the market. The trouble of course is that I dare not buy back in right now as feel I would be asking for trouble!

You can do things which have the same net effect as timing the markets though

E.g. If you're drip-feeding money, if you simply buy the gap between market peak and current value, you'll always be buying more when markets are down, and correcting your percentage loss (which means your investments boom when they come back up)

This method works on a mid-term basis - and it was the right way to play this dip (because there was simply no way to know whether it was a brief 'correction', or the beginning of a crash ... There still isn't) ... This simple approach should roughly double your returns vs drip-feeding or buy-and-hold (entering the market at fair value)

A more sophisticated approach is to use valuation, rather than price, because this can peer through the hidden market trends, like inflation

E.g. The FTSE 100 is near its all-time peak - but using valuation instead we see it's actually only around it's median value

Re: entering and exiting the market ... An old rule of thumb is: never be less than 25% in the market, or more than 50% ... I'd suggest that if you're buying only at low value, you can reasonably safely go up to 90%

TrustyOven

Ryan_Futuristics wrote: »

Re: entering and exiting the market ... An old rule of thumb is: never be less than 25% in the market, or more than 50% ... I'd suggest that if you're buying only at low value, you can reasonably safely go up to 90%

Could you please expand on this?
e.g. What are those percentages representing?

JohnRo

Thrugelmir wrote: »

So is the amount of money that's slushing around looking for a home.

Yes but only because QE counterfeiting fraud, on a scale difficult to comprehend, has created a borrow to speculate environment, propped up by ZIRP for the privileged and imposed by a dishonest central banking politburo.

For everyone else the amount of toxic debt and private speculative loss being transferred and socialised, then used to fuel this so called recovery is all that's going to matter because trickle down is a fiction.

le_loup

teepee83 wrote: »

It just goes to show you cannot time the market. The trouble of course is that I dare not buy back in right now as feel I would be asking for trouble!

Two contradictory statements. I hope you were being ironic.

Ryan_Futuristics

TrustyOven wrote: »

Could you please expand on this?
e.g. What are those percentages representing?

Sure

It means you should always have at least 25% of your savings invested in the stock market - to avoid missing out on potential gains ... But never more than 50% in the stock market - to limit potential losses

It's a very general rule ... Basically you've got to imagine whatever money you've got in the market could drop by 50% at any moment (but will probably rise again if you leave it) ... So if you've got £30,000 savings, and 50% of that in the market, then the maximum loss you're likely to experience is £7,500, taking your total savings down to £22,500 (and that's probably a worst case scenario)

Edit:

And of course, if your stocks went down that much, you'd only be about 30% in the market (so if you were smart, you'd top that stocks allocation back up to 50%, so when the market rises again you're suddenly much wealthier ... and that's where not being ALL invested in the stock market really pays)