Great British Invest off or Passive V Active Updates

Prism

Another month of recovery, unsure if it will last.

Prism Global - £112,524

TBC15

Well the rehash of the portfolio is going well I’m down ½ % on the old one already, early days.

TBC15 £112,040
BLB53 £104,297

ams25

AMS25 (active) 60:40 101944
Vanguard Ls 60:40 104297

active did better in the month (+2.9% vs +2.4%) but passive up 2.3% vs 0.2% over 1 yr.

so far this exercise has only served to increase my allocation to passives. I still believe a hybrid portfolio has some merits (eg Fundsmith or Lindsell Train global massively outperform a passive global tracker over 5 years) , but since starting this I have only increased my allocation to passive funds, also to further simplify my portfolio.

old habits die hard but i am getting there!!

Linton

Linton Growth £105553
Linton WP £99376

Prism

ams25 wrote: »

AMS25 (active) 60:40 101944
Vanguard Ls 60:40 104297

active did better in the month (+2.9% vs +2.4%) but passive up 2.3% vs 0.2% over 1 yr.

so far this exercise has only served to increase my allocation to passives. I still believe a hybrid portfolio has some merits (eg Fundsmith or Lindsell Train global massively outperform a passive global tracker over 5 years) , but since starting this I have only increased my allocation to passive funds, also to further simplify my portfolio.

old habits die hard but i am getting there!!

What has been letting the active funds down do you think? Has it been the bond funds or equity funds? A bit of both? For me it has been my allocation to small/mid cap active funds which are down between -4% and -12% over the year (feb to feb). Vanguard Global small cap index is up 2.5%

Linton

Prism wrote: »

What has been letting the active funds down do you think? Has it been the bond funds or equity funds? A bit of both? For me it has been my allocation to small/mid cap active funds which are down between -4% and -12% over the year (feb to feb). Vanguard Global small cap index is up 2.5%

My view:
As always Asset Allocation is key. Whether a fund is active or passive is a minor factor. In the past year Linton Growth has suffered both from its high allocation to small companies and its relatively low allocation to US, and has underperformed VLS100. Whereas in each of the the previous 4 years it was ahead.


Another general factor is that the active portfolios tend to be higher risk and so would be expected to perform worse than the index funds in periods of economic difficulty or uncertainty. However if we didnt believe that these conditions only apply for significantly less than 50% of the time we wouldnt be investing at all.

finellah

Finellah 9.1
FinellaVLS80 5.1
Vanguard All Cap 6.6

A_T

A_T's British Bulldog Portfolio

£100,923

0.92%

bostonerimus

Portfolio balance end of Feb 2019, $106575 (+6.6%) and the pound is basically back to the same level against the dollar as back in Oct 2017 so I've lost all my nice currency gains...come on "no deal".

ams25

Prism wrote: »

What has been letting the active funds down do you think? Has it been the bond funds or equity funds? A bit of both? For me it has been my allocation to small/mid cap active funds which are down between -4% and -12% over the year (feb to feb). Vanguard Global small cap index is up 2.5%

I tried to mirror the allocations of Vanguard's Life Strategy 60 as closely as I could with active funds (same % for US, Japan etc) , and within my fund selections i have big winners (fundsmith) and losers (Woodford) and a fair few in between... the resulting average performance has been below LS 60. Of course if Woodford have been replaced by Lindsell Train UK and a couple of other changes it would be the other way around. But as we don't have crystal balls....