Take a peek at my hand?

Ray_Singh-Blue

Update #43 Q3 2025

In July were able to pump in our full his 'n' hers ISA contributions for the year.

Bought some VWRP and some VGOV, in proportions enough to maintain the roughly 60:40 balance of stocks and not-stocks.

>> VWRP: £281K, Cash: £151K, VGOV: £60K, Other stuff: £52K. Total: £544K on October 3rd.

Past the half-million mark! Who would have thought it. The portfolio has roughly doubled in the last 2 years. About a third of the gain is due to the introduction of new funds. A third is due to the strong performance of world stock markets. And a third of it is due to risky, extra-curricular bets on this and that.

Cheers,

Ray

Ray_Singh-Blue

Update #44 Q4 2025

Another year over. Sold some of the "other stuff" because it rose a lot in value quite a lot in a short space of time. Reinvested the proceeds in VWRP.

Current state of play:

- VWRP £324K

- Cash £151K
- VGOV £62K
- other stuff (2 stocks) £42K

Total: £579K. 63% equities, 37% cash and bonds.

No big plans for 2026, just going to chug on. I have a very simple portfolio currently with just 4 holdings and some cash.

Happy New Year all.

hazmatt97

A very interesting read! You hold a lot of cash, I'm interested to understand why you don't put more of that into GILTS? Is the likelihood of UK gov going bankrupt surely less than your high street bank you're storing cash with going bankrupt? 

Is all of your equities in ISA wrapper?

Ray_Singh-Blue

@hazmatt97 : Thankyou. 

The post above is a bit of an over-simplification. In reality, Mrs Ray and I have £50K each of premium bonds. Everything else in the ISAs. Within the ISAs, I use CSH2 which is an overnight return money market ETF.

Rather than spell that out, I just call it all "cash". The important thing is that everything is tax sheltered & invested, and is separate from our current or savings accounts.

Why cash not bonds? Good question. If you read back a bit, you'll see that I got quite convinced by ideas behind *The Permanent Portfolio*, which calls for cash and bonds in equal proportions.

The idea is that cash and bonds both provide ballast against the volatility of the stock market, but they do so in different ways. Cash provides capital stability and dry powder to deploy in times of uncertainty. Bonds can save the day in times of recession, when falling interest rates can lead to increased capital value.

PS. In the spirit of full disclosure, the "other stuff" is currently shares in Alphabet, a Vanguard high yield ETF, and a lithium ETF called LITB.

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Edit: 8th Jan 2026

It’s time to place a bet for 2026. Sat on this for a few weeks, and have decided to go with Vanguard’s energy ETF, VDE. 

It's a bit risky. In the future, will we still need oil and gas? Renewables, electrification, and decarbonisation could push investors to discount oil and gas equities.

But my thesis is that we ain't there yet. And history suggests there’s always another energy squeeze lurking somewhere. Stuff in the news makes me wonder if another supply shock could be around the corner. If that happens, the companies in VDE should see profits, and valuations, rise.

Ethically, I want to invest in clean energy. But my working thesis is that the incumbent energy giants won’t just sink in a sea of solar panels. They’ll evolve into major players in the green transition too.

And anyway, part of my portfolio is already in lithium. If it all goes wrong, I'll just take the lithium.

So I’m tossing a coin and committing 5% to VDE. Which as of today, is £29,235, believe it or not. The bet is simple: that VDE outperforms VWRP enough, at some point over the next 5 years, to crystalise a portfolio advantage. 

Will let you know how it plays out.

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Edit ... nope, apparently can't hold VDE in an ISA. Instead I have bought ishares' offering SPOG, which tastes remarkably similar. Bit like chicken, bit like armadillo. 

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One more edit, 11th Jan. Yesterday I sold a big chunk of VWRP, and parked it back in cash. 2025 was a good year and I don't want to be greedy. Will see how things go over the next couple of months.

Porfolio is now: 

• equities £244K (42%)
• bonds and cash £343K (58%)
• total £587K

Ray_Singh-Blue

Update #45 Q1 2026

Far be it from me to claim any special insight. Even a stopped clock is right twice per day. But this worked out:

• "history suggests there’s always another energy squeeze lurking somewhere. Stuff in the news makes me wonder if another supply shock could be around the corner. If that happens, the companies in VDE should see profits, and valuations, rise."

As you probably know, there has been a bit of turbulence lately. The Oil and Gas fund SPOG has risen quite a lot. Bought for £30K 3 months ago, now worth £45K.

The bet was simple: "that it outperforms VWRP enough, at some point over the next 5 years, to crystalise a portfolio advantage". Well, that's what happened. Somewhat quicker than expected, truth be told. It was worth 230 units of VWRP, and now it is worth 370 units. 

So, I had to make a call. Has that bet been won *already*??

I concluded yes, and last week sold it.

Same with LITB, the lithium fund. Up 80% since January 2025. It has done its job. So, sold that too.

---

At the same time, the trusty core holding VWRP is down a little, probably due to uncertainty in wider markets.

Grappled a little with whether to buy back in. Markets might fall further still. Falling knives, etc.

But concluded I don't want to be less than 50% invested in equities, for any length of time. The risk of missing out on upside is just too great.

So I bought back into VWRP to restore target asset allocation of 60% stock, 40% cash and bonds.

The full portfolio is now:

• VWRP £334K (56%)
• GOOG £20K (4%)
• Cash £201K (33%)
• VGOV £40K (7%)

Total £595K

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Bonds though! What can you do with them? A lot of people suggest a balanced portfolio of stocks and bonds, and I like the idea in principle. Stocks provide growth at the expense of volatilty, bonds balance that with steady predictable value and income. Except, the bond fund VGOV hasn't really done that. It has dropped, dropped and dropped even further. It has had a really bad decade, and is showing a big red number, and quite frankly can get in the bin.

However, I sense binning bonds would be completely wrong at this point. Maybe they offer value and the chance of gain. Unlike stocks (which can go to zero or to the moon), they ought to revert to some sort of mean.

The obvious thing to do here may be to buy more bonds in hope of a recovery, and that’s roughly what I’m planning to do in Q2, when introducing some new funds for a new tax year. But keeping the 60:40 balance mentioned earlier. Easy numbers for sleeping.

That's all I have to say on the matter. Keep on keeping on,

Ray

Ray_Singh-Blue

Update #46 Q2 2026

A little early with this update, but I have some free time on a Saturday afternoon, and am in a pensive mood after a roller coaster few weeks, so here goes.

It has been a remarkable quarter. Incredibly, the portfolio is up over £100K since I last posted. The balance is currently £701K

A chunk of that increase is due to funding the ISAs for the 2026/27 tax year. The rest is mainly due to the increase in world stock markets, and an increase in the value of Alphabet shares. (As markets have been volatile, I also indulged in a little bit of cheeky shuffling of funds back and forth between the tracker fund VWRP, and the money market fund CSH2.)

Those Alphabet shares have more than doubled since I bought them in early 2025. Sold them, and on a whim bought some shares in my favourite affordable pub chain. Google is such a great company, and only time will tell if it was an incredibly stupid move to ditch it in favour of cheap pubs. But right now Alphabet still makes up 4% of VWRP, which means I still have about £11K invested in it through that index tracker.

Vanguard's UK government bond fund VGOV dropped to an all time low of £15.30 last month. Topped that up, and am hopeful of gains beyond the yield which is currently 4.7%.

The ISA portfolio now stands at:

• Cash (CSH2), £316K, 45%
• Equities (VWRP), £272K, 39%
• Bonds (VGOV), £103K, 15%
• Affordable pub chain (JDW), £10K, 1%

Which is all well and good.

However… all this excitement has rather shaken my previously calm demeanour. I have been logging on most days to check the value of the portfolio, and the volatile state of the markets- behaviours which I had largely managed to shake out of the system over the last few years.

In his short but excellent book 'If You Can' (free here), William Bernstein writes:

How risky are stocks? You’ve no idea. During the Great Depression, stocks lost, on average, around 90 percent of their value; during the recent financial crisis, they lost almost 60 percent. Although you might think that you can tolerate this kind of loss, guess again. It’s one thing to think about temporarily losing 60 percent or even 90 percent of your savings, the actual experience, in the moment, is unimaginably upsetting.

If you want high returns, you’re going to occasionally have to endure ferocious losses with equanimity, and if you want safety, you’re going to have to endure low returns.

Well, at this stage in the journey, the thought of "ferocious losses" scares me more than the prospect of missing out on high returns, and so I am happy with just 40% of the portfolio in equities (in fact, 25% is my mental "low tide mark"). If and when markets take a dip, I hope I'll revisit that and top up though.

For the moment it's hard to see where the next bit of growth will come from, but hopefully for now I am reasonably well insulated against big losses in the event of a correction.

Sat out the SpaceX IPO. Expect to own it through VWRP eventually.

Good luck all & see you in 3 months.

Ray.

moneysaver1978

Thanks for another insightful update! I too sat out the SpaceX IPO - I was rather tempted and by the time I had decided (still not 100%), the window to make an order closed.

Still feels like an exit strategy for the earlier investors although I do like the long-term prospects. I may still take a punt either directly or fund once the (gold) dust settles.