What's your portfolio?

Alexland

greenwood132 said:
I'm building positions in BNKRS and SMT to give me more global coverage and take advantage of current discounts.

I can see the attraction of BNKR. It suffered from only having a couple of the magnificent 7 shares that have been behind so much growth recently. Rate of dividend growth is strong and as you say the 12% discount is tempting. My view is it could do well going forwards and would probably be my choice if I wanted an active core global equities holding. Could be a good way to play any tech bubble that might have formed.

coastline

Linton said:

aroominyork said:

A few observations. First, if you contend that "any portfolio will give the same long term returns" why pay active management fees? Second, underweighting the US combined with a chunk of your US being low volatility is a strong tilt that has counted against you. Any regrets? Finally, I briefly dabbled in US smaller companies then decided they do not historically perform well against the S&P on a risk/return basis. Presumably you disagree?

I pay active management fees because it is not possible to get the underlying allocations I want with trackers.  The right allocation is more  important than the cheap allocation..   In the very long term the allocations should make no difference make no difference to returns.  However I am concerned about one-off events in the short/medium terms  I will not be around to take advantage of the very long term.    Increasing the diversification and reducing the size of the largest constituents is intended, amongst other things, to reduce the effect of localised one-off events, in particular tech booms and busts.

If you believe that the market knows best and that prices are "correct" as far as anyone knows surely it follows that this implies that all investments in the market are expected to make the same returns.  If the market believed otherwise the poorer investments would be sold and their price would decrease.  So why should the tilts make any long term difference? 

Dabbling is the wrong way to develop a portfolio.  The very short term will lead you astray ignoring those areas of the market temporarily out of favour and investing in other areas which are already highly priced.

A graph for you.  I find it difficult to see  that anything has counted against me...



I cannot go any further back since some of the funds were not available but it does seem that the 2 graphs are remarkably close with my portfolio slightly ahead.

Just an observation and I'm not disputing this is your portfolio but in a long running thread you present totally different figures. 

Your growth 5 years ago. 108.640 or 8.6% and Vanguard All Cap 16.4% 

Great British Invest off or Passive V Active Updates - Page 36 — MoneySavingExpert Forum

The last post I can see June 2023  your growth figures are 134880 or 34.8% . Vanguard All Cap 61%.

 Great British Invest off or Passive V Active Updates - Page 76 — MoneySavingExpert Forum

EDIT..Information wasn't hard find as both threads were on the first page of the Savings Forum. 

mika_dm

Here is my portfolio too.

Quick perspective: mid 40s,still in accumulation phase, a DB pension which can be taken at 55(it will be almost covering the very essential life expenses), a mixture of GIA+ISA+SIPP(which can be taken at 55 with Fidelity). I invest mostly in stocks and IT's due to platform fees being capped. I keep some cash as an emergency fund and closer to retirement age will keep 2-4 years in cash(I'll see how I feel by then). I don't keep bonds as my DB will act as a bond fund which will pay me monthly.

I have a concentrated portfolio, following the approach of Buffett(mostly) and Fisher, in companies with low debt, high ROE and net margins. I know the risks are high, but with at least 20-30 years ahead I think I have enough time to ride the volatility. I don't have a fixed allocation for each item, but rebalancing with new money or opening new position every financial year if opportunities appear. I don't plan to have lots of stocks/ITs, but to have quality ones.

At the moment portfolio looks like this(value of portfolio is low-ish 6 figures)

Cash              7.2%
Investor AB    5.19%
GOOGL         13.59%
Berkshire B   15.19%
Microsoft       14.17%
Visa               10.77%
FCIT               7.65%
SAIN               8.11%
HGT                8.92%
ATST               9.21%

Stocks in ISA and GIA and IT's in SIPP.

I'm opened to discussion 

ColdIron

greenwood132 said:

Well I'm sure everyone will say mine is completely wrong.

SIPP & Company Pension
City of London investment trust 78%
Royal London Global 9%
Bankers Investment trust 5.3%
Scottish Mortgage Investment trust 4.2%
BAE 3.2%

Like many income investors CTY is an important part of my portfolio. I also use BNKR even though it is at the bottom end of what I consider an acceptable yield but it helps to keep the bottom line out of the red. However I don't think SMT has any place in an income portfolio. Very low yield and very volatile. Just my view

Linton

coastline said:

Just an observation and I'm not disputing this is your portfolio but in a long running thread you present totally different figures. 

Your growth 5 years ago. 108.640 or 8.6% and Vanguard All Cap 16.4% 

Great British Invest off or Passive V Active Updates - Page 36 — MoneySavingExpert Forum

The last post I can see June 2023  your growth figures are 134880 or 34.8% . Vanguard All Cap 61%.

 Great British Invest off or Passive V Active Updates - Page 76 — MoneySavingExpert Forum

Interesting to see my collected works being studied.  I have just done some archeology and  what happened is...

The original idea of the thread was to ask people to suggest portfolios that could represent passive or active funds that people thought would do well in subsequent years and then to see what would happen.

My growth portfolio was then very different based more on small companies and high growth as my current ideas were much less developed, perhaps not developed at all. So the real portfolio composition was changing significantly over time.  Also I was moving money around which would have made the total portfolio valuations completely  meaningless and so I set up a dummy portfolio which showed the ongoing effect of changes to the % allocations but removed the effects of cash additions and withdrawals.  However this proved to be an error prone process.  To make matters worse any error made continued into perpetuity.

Eventually things got so completely out of hand there was no point in continuing. 

However I have been able to resurrect one of my earliest portfolios.  It is interesting to see how its performance compares over the past 5 years with my current one which is totally different.....





"My portfolio"
WIth very different underlying investments:

aroominyork

I'm confused by the difference between 1) your current portfolio 2) 'My portfolio' and 3) Growth 8. But in any case what coastline seems to have shown is that on the monthly thread you underperformed the index by some distance up to last year; and what you presented on this thread as your performance over 5+ years is mostly a retrospective view on a portfolio you selected last year. Do I misunderstand?

Linton

aroominyork said:

I'm confused by the difference between 1) your current portfolio 2) 'My portfolio' and 3) Growth 8. But in any case what coastline seems to have shown is that on the monthly thread you underperformed the index by some distance up to last year; and what you presented on this thread as your performance over 5+ years is mostly a retrospective view on a portfolio you selected last year. Do I misunderstand?

"My portfolio" is generated by Trustnet and just means the current one selected.  The portfolios  based on my current approach are Growth 5-8 which represent successive annual attempts to increase the scope of the management of multiple factors across the overall portfolio.  All show very similar performance graphs to VGFAC with 5 year performance to date varying between 55 and 60.

Portfolios prior to Growth 5 in 2021 were based on a high risk/high return appoach with a focus to small companies.  The one identified by Coastline was of that type and in any case the successive month by month data at the time seems to have been corrupted by arithmetic errors.  That is not now relevent since the actual graph can now be plotted accurately over a longer time period.

The point remains that very different but well diversified portfolios appear to be showing surprisingly similar results.  I think this is worth investigating further in a more controlled way.

FIREmenow

Here's mine in ISA/LISA, tracked on Morningstar:

Vanguard LifeStrategy 80% Equity A Acc 40.52%

Invesco FTSE All-World ETF Acc GBP 27.92%

HSBC FTSE All-World Index C Acc 22.46%

Vanguard LifeStrategy 100% Equity 5.01%

iShares Global Govt Bond ETF GBP H Dist 2.61%

Vanguard UK Govt Bd Idx £ Acc 1.48%

So about half in global trackers including emerging markets.
About 40% in equities via lifestrategy (so overweight UK) 
About 10% in various bonds. 

I keep a 90/10 split in mind, but rarely sell, and maintain it with new money.

Have two DB pensions of about £7k total so far, still contributing to one.
Also building up small DC pot of global equities.

39, mortgage-free, want to retire as soon as I can, but not later than 58.

Waiting for a good time to sell those bond funds and replace with global bonds that are accumulating. 

The LS100 and the UK bonds are relics from when I started investing 9 years ago. Leaving LS100 to see how far it will go. Current total gain is 114%, makes up for the 10% loss the UK bonds are sitting at!

LS80 is also part of my investing evolution, new money is going into cheaper global trackers.

Was thinking of tilting away from US large-cap equities, but this has reminded me how overweight in UK I am. Would probably want to sell some LS80 to do that, rather than just use new money, don't want it to get too messy.

Alexland

ColdIron said:

Like many income investors CTY is an important part of my portfolio. I also use BNKR even though it is at the bottom end of what I consider an acceptable yield but it helps to keep the bottom line out of the red. 

I still like MUT as somewhere in the middle of the two. IMHO it has a higher quality companies than CTY with good ESG such as no tobacco, around 20% international shares like MSFT for industry diversification and because of the wide discount it's possible to buy at a circa 4.5% yield. If someone buys a good UK income trust now then I would expect the yield to overtake the popular money market funds over the next year or two.

solidpro

20% fixed assets (outright own my own house) saving me interest on mortgages
20% property (outright own, let out to tenants) making instant income on rent, long term on appreciation
30% SIPP 100% equity sitting there for another 20 years compounding 
20% ISA 100% equity sitting there compounding but could liquidate it if we needed it.
10% Cash in decent interest account as buffer and paying the bills, topped up every 6 months from current employment

Some smaller lumps of precious metals, collectible art, £10k shares in 25-year wind/solar farm co-operatives, fun stuff. Drip feeding into kids JISAs and savings funds to help them when they're old and I'm older. I consider that we have owned a nice electric car for 4 years as an investment. It charges 7ppkw on Octopus overnight means we can drive all over the place at virtually the cost of tyre wear and is shortly 60% subsidised along with the rest of our house energy usage by the wind farm share. Saves us a lot on silly rip off train fares. Will keep it another 4-6 years.