My Portfolio

kempiejon

didn't necessarily need the greatest performance, just enough to meet your investing requirements. That's one of the keys to successful investing, IMO, as it implies an understanding of risk and reward and your personal finances. 

Just pulling out this aspect of self knowledge as it's a handy reminder. I have tried several different investing styles the most profitable/lucky was hard work and stressful - a focussed researched value/recovery method of picking individual stocks. I poured over accounts, made my own spreadsheets and calculations. I returned 20% annualised gains over 5 years but volatile, did I say stressful. These days lower growth with little to no work suits me, 7-8% most years and similar annualised over the past 20 years. Good enough - I'm still not sure if I was clever or lucky with those 20% years and I'm not inclined to check.

Bostonerimus1

kempiejon said:

didn't necessarily need the greatest performance, just enough to meet your investing requirements. That's one of the keys to successful investing, IMO, as it implies an understanding of risk and reward and your personal finances. 

Just pulling out this aspect of self knowledge as it's a handy reminder. I have tried several different investing styles the most profitable/lucky was hard work and stressful - a focussed researched value/recovery method of picking individual stocks. I poured over accounts, made my own spreadsheets and calculations. I returned 20% annualised gains over 5 years but volatile, did I say stressful. These days lower growth with little to no work suits me, 7-8% most years and similar annualised over the past 20 years. Good enough - I'm still not sure if I was clever or lucky with those 20% years and I'm not inclined to check.

I the mid 1990s my indexing approach produced 5 years of greater than 20% returns, but that was followed by a run of negative years. It was early in my investing path and so I kept buying and rebalancing and it has worked out ok. Since I retired in 2014 I'd done nothing to my portfolio, but Trump's tariffs made me sell some US stocks and bond funds and replace them with global equivalents. I don't plan to do anything else for a while so it's back to Margarita's and a good book...and forum posts.

masonic

chiang_mai said:

masonic said:

Indeed it is very large, and it is large for a reason, companies flock to it from all over the world. This means there are many options available to dilute the things that are making you shy away from it. The S&P400 includes companies with a market cap between $2-30bn, many of which would qualify for inclusion in the FTSE 100 if listed on the London Stock Exchange. You have practically no exposure to those, and relatively more exposure to the Mag7 as a result. There are also minimum volatility or value factor funds available that could be paired with a cap-weighted tracker to increase your exposure without increasing your concentration in the parts of the market you consider undesirable. An equal weight fund is also an option, albeit not one I'd consider.

Unfortunately my platform provider, HL, doesn't have much in the way of managed S&P400 funds, which leaves me with the possibility of an ETF tracker only. I have held VG Global SC's previously but the volatility makes me very nervous and has caused flesh wounds previously. Perhaps 4% of an ETF is the better solution, which would increase my US holdings but not significantly.

I was contemplating downsizing Smartgarp UK in favour of a UK All Shares tracker. But then I decided against the idea because small and medium caps are already well represented within the SG fund. And finally, I've looked again at the risk of the SG EU fund, which at a 7% allocation seems very reasonable to me, especially when balances against the large cap Fid EU Divi fund.

I'm still sleeping well at nights but Japan is causing the occasional bad dream! 

HL offers 179 funds covering North America, large and small, and perhaps in that set there is something suitable, but it is quite a haystack! I've tended to find that managed funds I've held have tended to be more volatile in falling markets than an index fund. Perhaps because fund managers aim to outperform their benchmark, and to do that it is better to focus on performance in rising markets, which is the more common scenario. Perhaps also because nobody can predict when markets will turn, and to take evasive action can be very costly, moreso than riding out downturns. Those rare fund managers that are willing to accept (and can survive) being low in the rankings during the good times are unlikely to attract much capital on the virtue that they fall less during the bad times. So an ETF was my vehicle of choice.

chiang_mai

Bostonerimus1 said:

You said somewhere in this thread that you didn't necessarily need the greatest performance, just enough to meet your investing requirements. That's one of the keys to successful investing, IMO, as it implies a closed loop understanding of risk and reward and your personal finances. We all have our own investing styles, but I'm of the opinion that fine detail asset allocation and fund comparisons are mostly navel gazing and we just delude ourselves that they have any meaning taken over a reasonable time span. It's dangerous for most investors to get swept up in this as they end up over managing their money when they could be doing something useful like reading a novel.

Yes, both parts of what you wrote are true and correct. I also confess to being guilty at times of unnecessary "tweaking" or fine tuning, although most of it usually remains in the analysis phase and is never executed. And without wishing to appear to be making excuses, that sort of exploration can be useful at times because it's a source of exploration and learning that sometimes produces positive results. Case in point is US medium caps that I believe Masonic pointed out. I do have a large gap in my portfolio in that respect but having now explored the options, there's no rush or need to fill that gap, just add it to the future to do list.