Portfolio Check

adamcartney

I'm (fairly) new to investing but after researching the basics for about a year or so I've contributed £20,000 to a SIPP and £15,000 to this year's ISA.

To my mind, I've bought into well-reviewed funds/ITs and am geographically diversified, but I wouldn't mind a second opinion from the learned folks on this site.

(I'm aware that I'm heavily invested in equities but I'm fine with this and don't want to buy into bonds at the moment. I want to be a buy and hold investor, looking 20 years + down the line).

Any thoughts/criticisms etc gratefully received.


SIPP

Vanguard LifeStrategy 100 19%
Baillie Gifford Global Discovery 17%
Artemis Global Income 15%
First State Asian Pacific Leaders 15%
Slater Growth 11%
Legal & General Global Healthcare and Pharma Index 11%
Fidelity Index Emerging Markets 6%
Vanguard Small Cap 6%


ISA

Fundsmith 26%
City of London IT 12%
Scottish Mortgage IT 11%
Finsbury G&I IT 11%
Biotech Growth IT 6%
Blackrock Frontiers IT 6%
F&C Global Small Co IT 6%
TR Property IT 6%
Scottish Oriental Small Cos 6%
Baillie Gifford Japan IT 5%
Murray International 5%

Jsscmm

A few thoughts. Firstly don't forget about the BR and potentially HR tax relief on the SIPP.

Secondly that is a lot of funds for that amount of money. Quite a number of them are well or very well thought of by various posters on here so I imagine that they may have some positives, but it is a lot of different funds!

Considering the specifics in the sipp, I'm not quite sure the role for ls100... The percentage seems small for a 'core'.

The funds in the isa seem to be very aggressive overall.

That said, I usually learn more from reading these threads than from posting myself, so I'm looking forward to other people's views.

BLB53

Looks like a well constructed portfolio - you appear to have put in a lot of work and research.

My main thought would be that it looks fairly aggressive and I am just wondering how you might react when the markets head south - of course, none of us know until we experience it. You may be the sort who can ride it out.

20 years is a good length of time so you will find out at some point but good luck with the journey!

masonic

This basically looks fine as a pretty adventurous long term portfolio to which defensive assets will be added in the future. A few comments:

- Echo Jsscmm's comment about Vanguard LS in the SIPP. Would an ultra-cheap global tracker suffice here? Is there a rationale for including this in addition to the two actively managed global funds?

- The Pharma tracker is an interesting choice when you have gone for active funds elsewhere. Do you not think this index fund might be bogged down by the leviathans of the sector and under-exposed to the high growth small-medium sized companies? Or are you reasoning that BIOG held in your ISA will balance things out?

- The choice to go mostly with ITs in your ISA will make it quite difficult to keep your costs down while your portfolio is small. 5% of £15k is only £750, so I hope you are not buying in lumps smaller than that and using a platform with cheap trading costs.

adamcartney

Thanks.
The Index funds in the SIPP were the first ones that I invested in (about 6 months ago) when I was new to the "game" and wanted to ease myself into investing gradually. But as I did more research I became more comfortable with active funds. I plan to add about 10k min to the SIPP every year. From now on, the bulk of that will go into the Index funds so they will be a bigger percentage (esp. VLS100).


I appreciate what Jsscmm says about the no. of funds. In hindsight, I probably would have invested in fewer ITs in the ISA. However, I plan to stick this with lot, reinvest dividends and make a lump sum payment at the start of every ISA year. I'm with TD and they have a cheap dividend reinvestment scheme (plus no annual change on ITs/shares).