SJP Portfolio value drop

MarzipanCrumble

I picked medium/high risk too.  But I am not dependent on what it does and am in it for at least 5+ years.   My percentage of American equities is high;  USA was doing especially well .......  Now it is suffering like the rest of the world's stock markets. 

Hang on in there.  If Trump does his 'deals' likely the stock markets will breathe a sigh of relief and go up....  But who knows?

Hoenir

MarzipanCrumble said:

 If Trump does his 'deals' likely the stock markets will breathe a sigh of relief and go up....  But who knows?

You cannot force people to buy products that they don't want nor can afford to buy. Trump has no real interest in doing deals. Other than gaining some form of commercial benefit for the USA. 

Aretnap

concernedfriend137 said:

I asked ChatGPT if this loss could be explained by the current market and it said a 12% to 13% loss was more than should be expected. It suggested requesting a breakdown of the portfolio from SJP and getting advice from an independent financial advisor. 

Chat GPT is an algorithm that produces plausible-looking text - a very souped up version of the feature on your phone that suggests the next word as you type. It's not an encyclopedia, still less a source of financial advice.

SJP is generally a poor choice of investment platform, but that's because it has very high fees, a limited choice of funds, and nothing in the performance of those funds that justified the high fees, rather than because of anything specific that has happened in the last few weeks. For a medium to high risk fund a 12% drop (before today) is not wildly out of line with what would be expected in current market conditions, nor is it exceptional compared with other stock market falls which have taken place over the last couple of decades. 

Is certainly suggest that she considered alternatives to SJP for the trains above, but I'd have suggested that the months ago, and there is no need to panic on the short term.

Albermarle

Looking at a typical medium/high risk multi asset fund, she should have seen growth of around 60% over 5 years and that takes into account the recent drops.

I said the above in a previous post.
Now it has clicked that it is an SJP product, you can probably reduce that 60% to 50%, due to the high fees they charge.

callum9999

While I applaud you for not just blindly believing ChatGPT and seeking clarification, the ever increasing use of it as an authority by people who don't understand what it is is incredibly disturbing.

The general public were ignorant enough as it is, now even that minority who has a basic interest in whether their opinions are true or not are slowly switching from basic research to "what does this large language model say?". (For those unaware, ChatGPT etc. aren't AI in the way people generally understand that term, they look for patterns in language and then copy it - hence why you get them doing things like recommending you eat a certain number of rocks per day because an Onion article said so etc.).

concernedfriend137

Thank you all for your comments. Although the £65k loss is a tough thing to see, you have confirmed that it’s not totally unreasonable in the current climate and the medium/high risk portfolio.
My partner has only been investing since 2019 and, even though things took a hit during covid, she doesn’t remember it being this bad. I bet it won’t recover as quickly as it dropped! 

dunstonh

concernedfriend137 said:

Thank you all for your comments. Although the £65k loss is a tough thing to see, you have confirmed that it’s not totally unreasonable in the current climate and the medium/high risk portfolio.
My partner has only been investing since 2019 and, even though things took a hit during covid, she doesn’t remember it being this bad. I bet it won’t recover as quickly as it dropped! 

It was worse over Covid.   Ballpark loss on equities was 35% with Covid vs circa 20% current.

SpeedSouth

I'd suggest if she only started investing in 2019 the drop whilst larger in %, was actually a much smaller amount of money so didn't cause the amount of stress and sleepless nights this one has.

My portfolio started very similar to hers, but has dropped further given the riskier portfolio, I'd rather it stay low for the next few years.  Jumping back up just means I'm buying high again.

Hoenir

concernedfriend137 said:

Thank you all for your comments. Although the £65k loss is a tough thing to see, you have confirmed that it’s not totally unreasonable in the current climate and the medium/high risk portfolio.
My partner has only been investing since 2019 and, even though things took a hit during covid, she doesn’t remember it being this bad. I bet it won’t recover as quickly as it dropped! 

Then use the service that she is paying for. Easy to say what level of risk appetite you have at the outset. When the markets become volatile as they are now. The reality in hard earned £'s tends to focus people's attention. It's possible to make decent a reasonable long term return without taking undue risks. There's no harm in a thorough annual review to ensure that the strategy is the right one.  Human nature being such that greed kicks in, just a little bit more then a bit more.

Albermarle

concernedfriend137 said:

Thank you all for your comments. Although the £65k loss is a tough thing to see, you have confirmed that it’s not totally unreasonable in the current climate and the medium/high risk portfolio.
My partner has only been investing since 2019 and, even though things took a hit during covid, she doesn’t remember it being this bad. I bet it won’t recover as quickly as it dropped! 

It is normal that when stock markets drop that it usually happens quite quickly, and when they grow it is more steady.

A lot of the problem is about perception which is distorted by the way the media report .
Stock market goes down 10% in 2 days  - Headlines ' ARMAGEDDON' ' BLOODBATH' etc 
Stock market goes up 20% in a year - Nothing mentioned. 
Also people have a tendency to be focused on the here and now, and forget the past. It even has a name 'recency bias'
Also they have a natural loss aversion, where losses hurt more than gains.

However the actual facts are that a  global stock market index fund has risen just over 100% since the middle of 2019 to today.