Defensive suggestions.

if you're too bearish to put it in shares, but too bullish to put it in cash/bonds, then the obvious answer is a mixture of shares and cash/bonds.

that is basically what must of those "wealth preservation" funds do.

investing doesn't have to be complicated

(well, i realise when people know nothing about it, it looks complex to them. but when you do know a bit about it, there is no requirement to keep making it more complex.)

Whatever you put into non-equities will probably underperform what you put into rquities, given long enough, so it's understandable that you are relucant to go and buy some outright non-equities funds. But if you refuse to buy non-equities funds while wanting to be cushioned against a downside, I suppose that generally means getting funds which hold a mix of asset classes, whether you prefer the investing style of RIT or Ruffer or PA or Troy or some of those risk-targted index-based funds-of-funds from the likes of HSBC or L&G..

talexuser wrote: »

Ruffer has a high OCF of 1.16 and has gone nowhere recently

Are you looking for something that goes somewhere when equity markets are going up but then doesn't drop when they drop? Sounds like a case of wanting to have your cake and eat it too.

Maybe you would be better looking for an 'absolute return' fund which aims to get a positive return whatever markets are doing via strategies which are market neutral or at least not too correlated with either equities or bonds.. But cynics would say they subsist on luck as much as manager skill and if you are benchmarking them against an unfettered long-only fund you would probably think they don't go up as fast as your equities when your equities are going up, and then be disappointed, even though they are designed for s different role in your portfolio..

I'm not so bearish as to want bonds

Yet if you look at something like Capital Gearing which you are considering buying, or Personal Assets which you already bought, they both have 40%+ in bonds. I guess you are saying you actually don't mind bonds and just want a lower risk, less adventurous fund where the manager picks the split between equities and debt so that you don't have to see yorseld buying bonds, even though you are of course taking exposure to bonds rather than letting it be another 100% equities fund which wouldn't be very defensive.

As grey gymsock mentions, if you don't want equities because of risk of dropping in an equities crash and you don't want bonds because of risk of dropping in a bond crash and because of long term underperformance vs equities, then one solution is just to have a bit of both, which you could buy yourself independently (by getting a long equities fund and a long bond fund and smushing the two together into the gap in your portfolio and periodically rebalancing).

That's assuming you have exhausted other options which might be considered to sit in between, or be less correlated to one or the other- e.g. property, infrastructure, hedge/absolute return. What do you currently have in that space?

You mention holding RIT Capital Partners. They have a mixture of public equities, private equities, holdings of debt/credit and absolute return funds, real assets such as property and gold, etc. Conceptually it's a reasonably diversified portfolio - due to coverage of a bunch of asset classes - but not without its risks and concentrations in certain areas. Really, for your portfolio as a whole - assuming you don't know what's coming next - you should aim to have exposure to a bunch of asset classes and sectors and regions and then just do as you suggest: sit back and 'weather the storms'.

You can do that through specialist funds for single asset classes or by using funds which have a generally defensive positioning when markets are relatively high. The latter is no doubt easier and the profile of returns is maybe more acceptable as if there's more than one asset class in the fund you will get a blended result closer to the averages of different parts of the market rather than the somewhat stark result of only one part of the market. But of course if you ar going to trust someone to construct you a defensive corner of your portfolio using a mix of asset classes, you have to decide who to trust on how to do ir -e.g. the Troy team, the Ruffer team, etc etc.

If you keep on asking for recommendations and end up buying into everyone in the space, you will get a blend of the best ideas and the worst ideas and it might have been better to just go with some cheaper solution rather than paying the 1% or whatever to get everyone's ideas and end up with a big blend of everything. That leads people to suggest indexes as an option though capital preservation is IMHO not something you do by sitting on an index and riding it up and down. There are of course multi-asset funds built as a blend of indexes as a cheap n cheerful way to lower your exposure to global equities..

talexuser wrote: »

.......I'm not so bearish as to want bonds, since have enough time to weather whatever comes next........

This whole thread has avoided gold, not surprising given the long history of prejudice, so if you are prepared for an extended timeframe and have the patience to "weather whatever" then why not go for the traditional safe haven.

Dividends on cash are inflation negative, and equities are nothing to really shout about either..._