FAQ

[Jon46]

Running HYPs in Practice
HYPs are Diversified, Little-Traded Share Portfolios aimed at getting Sustainable Dividend Income



As long as we are not prescriptive on how that diversification is achieved.

Jon

[Stonge]

Thanks Gengulphus, that looks good to me.

[Lootman]

Running HYPs in Practice
HYPs are Diversified, Little-Traded Share Portfolios aimed at getting Sustainable Dividend Income

I'm not claiming that's a perfect description of the topic, but I think it's reasonably close. And it could almost certainly do with some more polishing - in particular, the sub-title is a bit long.

Not bad, but a bit long as you say.

I think there is some redundamcy between the use of "Running" and "in Practice". It seems to me that the running of anything is a practical question, as opposed to thoughts about whether to run it at all, which is more "strategies" or "theoretical"

Why not just "HYP Practicals"?

As to the sub-title it could be shortened too. "Little traded" sounds to me a lot like "long-term buy and hold" which, if agreed, has the advantage of having a well-accepted acronym - LTBH.

"income" in there might be redundant because dividends are by definition a form of income.

And "getting sustainable" could instead just say "sustaining". That would give us:

"HYPs are Diversified LTBH Share Portfolios aimed at sustaining Dividends"

I might prefer "sustaining and growing" there but then I'm making it long again.

[Gengulphus]

The trouble is Arb, no-one has the proprietorial rights to HYP and I take the three letters simply as a shortened version of High Yield Portfolio or HY Portfolio if you like.

That is why I say a High Yield Portfolio is just that. You are inferring that HYP has a special meaning. I for one cannot accept that other than that it means High Yield Portfolio. ...

And I cannot accept that it means nothing more than High Yield Portfolio, because it will be extremely tedious:

* to have to explain "HYP back then meant something very different to what it means now" every time old HYP material comes up;

* to watch and wade through the endless arguments that will develop because people have failed to adjust to the change in meaning.

Basically, it's my view that although the term was poorly chosen, it's well-established now and about 15 years too late to change it in a major way.

I will accept its meaning changing a bit if a good rationale is given. If it emerges e.g. from polling that most people involved in such discussions on this site want its meaning to change drastically, I will accept that decision - but my acceptance of that decision will take the form of withdrawing completely or near-completely from HYP discussions on this site. I will not accept that its meaning has to change drastically just because you or anyone else says that they'll accept nothing else.

... The whole idea of The Lemon Fool is to keep it simple and avoid too many Boards of dubious value and as I said the HYP Strategies Board was never used much except as it happens by the late lamented Luni.

Well, there was never such a thing as the "HYP Strategies" board, but assuming you mean the "High Yield - Share Strategies" board, you're wrong about that. In the year following the board split, the High Yield - HYP Practical board's post number increased by 6098 (from 1 to 6099), while the High Yield - Share Strategies board's post number increased by 7555 (from 52210 to 59762). I.e. it averaged over 20 posts per day and was the more-used of the two boards. Its usage did then fall away - in the following year, the increments were 5777 (to 11876) and 2568 (to 62330) - so if you'd said something like "wasn't used much in recent years", you'd be right. But "was never used much" is wrong.

Gengulphus

[Gengulphus]

"HYPs are Diversified LTBH Share Portfolios aimed at sustaining Dividends"

I might prefer "sustaining and growing" there but then I'm making it long again.

OK, I know what I said about polishing, but I've spotted a glaring omission in what I wrote that I want to correct, you've found some useful improvements and your final comment made me think that the aim is dividend growth - merely-sustained dividends are not the bullseye, but an outer ring of the target.

I'm not keen on "HYP Practicals", though - the use of "Practical" as a noun is less than ideal from a 'plain English' point of view. Although "Running HYPs in Practice" is longer, I don't think it's unacceptably so, so my current offering is:

Running HYPs in Practice
HYPs are Diversified LTBH Share Portfolios aimed at High & Growing Dividends

Gengulphus

[Breelander]

Board title should be something like 'Income Share Portfolios using Share Dividends as an alternative to an annuity'

Simple.

No, sorry, it isn't simple...

My suggestion would be to have a 'High Yield Shares' forum and make both 'HY Strategies' and 'The High Yield Portfolio' sub-forums of that. Then there could be no doubt that the HYP forum would be intended just for the specific pyad strategy. Value discussions could also take place in the parent folder (or a new sub-forum) as yet there seems to be no dedicated 'Value' forum.

[Stonge]

Running HYPs in Practice
HYPs are Diversified LTBH Share Portfolios aimed at High & Growing Dividends

That is a good combination.

There could be a sticky thread on the board explaining some of the philosophy, terminology, and history of the pyad HYP.

[Dod1010]

Stonge has mentioned pyad. I was trying to avoid that. The point I was trying to make is that the Lemon Fool is trying to simplify things and I am trying to say that we need just a HYP Board. No-one, pyad or anyone else, has proprietorial rights to HYP and so we can give it the meaning we decide it has. I vote that we decide it means High Yield Portfolio, no bells or whistles.

[kempiejon]

Stonge has mentioned pyad. I was trying to avoid that. The point I was trying to make is that the Lemon Fool is trying to simplify things and I am trying to say that we need just a HYP Board. No-one, pyad or anyone else, has proprietorial rights to HYP and so we can give it the meaning we decide it has. I vote that we decide it means High Yield Portfolio, no bells or whistles.

Is this a "new" meaning for HYP, to be explained at a later date as opposed to the established meaning I think I've come to understand?

[Dod1010]

[quote="kempiejon"
Is this a "new" meaning for HYP, to be explained at a later date as opposed to the established meaning I think I've come to understand?[/quote]

I am sure you know what I mean. The old TMF Board was supposed to be exclusively for the pyad version of HYP with which I expect you are familiar.

It took me some time to 'get it' so maybe you are in the same boat. I will not rehearse all of pyad's views again but I would refer to see this Board be a bit broader in its understanding of the meaning of HYP.

That is my only point.

[Stonge]

Given that a lot of past history is no longer so easily available to new subscribers to the board, I was only suggesting that pyad be mentioned in the 'sticky' in an educational sense - not as a prescriptive or proscriptive constraint on the board, that's for the board leaders to decide.

Also it could be suggested in the sticky (board guide?) that one of the applications for such a portfolio might be to provide an alternative to purchasing an annuity.

Come to think of it, I prefer the concept of a Board Guide rather than FAQs as it could be a mix of 'rules', guidance, background information and other stuff which the board leaders could provide.

[kempiejon]

[quote="kempiejon"
Is this a "new" meaning for HYP, to be explained at a later date as opposed to the established meaning I think I've come to understand?

I am sure you know what I mean. The old TMF Board was supposed to be exclusively for the pyad version of HYP with which I expect you are familiar.

It took me some time to 'get it' so maybe you are in the same boat. I will not rehearse all of pyad's views again but I would refer to see this Board be a bit broader in its understanding of the meaning of HYP.

That is my only point.[/quote]

So that's a yes, you think its time for a new meaning for HYP specific to this board to be fleshed out later but basically not the TMF meaning. Do you have a draft or is this a crowd sources meaning? From the old faqs the TMF boards had moved some way from the pyad articles. In fact, from comments elsewhere on the boards I guess many people didn't read the faqs let alone the pyad articles.

[Dod1010]

kempiejohn

Your latest post is a bit weird. It is difficult to say what is quoted and what is not but of course, down to (/quote) with square brackets, are my words for the sake of anyone not quite following it. Not criticising; I have not yet got the hang of all of this either.

Yes maybe I am making too much of this but in summary and at the risk of repeating myself, I would prefer not to see this board limited to discussing HYP according to pyad. and I am not sure there is any point in really extending the discussion. Let's just wait and see what transpires.

[Gengulphus]

I am sure you know what I mean. The old TMF Board was supposed to be exclusively for the pyad version of HYP with which I expect you are familiar.

Yes, I know that's what you mean - but it quite simply isn't true, and no matter how much you repeat it, it won't become true.

The old TMF board was supposed to include tjh290633's strategy, for example, and that's very noticeably different from pyad's in a number of ways. For example, TJH's strategy includes quite a bit of tinkering, whereas pyad is strongly against it, and TJH has 30+ holdings while pyad has said that no more than about 15 are needed (and has pretty much stuck to that in practice - I don't think I've ever seen a pyad HYP with more than 16 holdings).

The truth is that the TMF board was supposed to be about a class of strategies that had some characteristics in common - not just high yield, but also some indication of dividend safety, diversification, not being traded much, aimed at getting income (*), holding individual shares rather than funds, and being fully-invested. That made its topic much narrower than just any old high-yield portfolio, but also significantly broader than "exclusively for the pyad version of HYP".

That set of characteristics was very deliberately chosen, both as regards what was in it and what wasn't in it, and the choice was very much made on the basis of what had and hadn't been causing heated arguments on the previous High Yield Portfolio board (which had its topic broadened and was renamed as High Yield - Share Strategies in the split). For example, on the question of trading, TJH's tinkering hadn't been causing such arguments (disagreements with it, yes, but those disagreements were discussed reasonably calmly) but there had also been ideas about wholesale 'going to cash' that had been causing heated arguments. Since the main purpose of the split was to allow as many as possible of those who wanted to escape the heated arguments to do so, a low level of voluntary trading was allowed but not high levels of it.

(*) It's perfectly possible to run a high-yield strategy that is not really aimed at getting income - I know because I did exactly that in my early years at TMF, from late 1999 to late 2002.

Gengulphus

[88V8]

So long as it doesn't use the term 'equities'. There are for instance Prefs, to which I shall occasionally make reference as they form part of my HYP.

But if we turn pages of FAQ into a one-line sub-title, there's either going to be a great deal of moderation or very little !

V8

[tjh290633]

Should this thread be made sticky? Or maybe a cut down version of it?

I stopped looking at it once it started going over the same old ground, but it does cover a lot of arguments which were done to death in the past. Having it in a more prominent position might stop it being a perpetual point of dissent.

TJH

[idpickering]

Stonge has mentioned pyad. I was trying to avoid that. The point I was trying to make is that the Lemon Fool is trying to simplify things and I am trying to say that we need just a HYP Board. No-one, pyad or anyone else, has proprietorial rights to HYP and so we can give it the meaning we decide it has. I vote that we decide it means High Yield Portfolio, no bells or whistles.

I don't want to sound like a dod. Groupie but I agree with all of his comment. In line with keeping it simple

Ian

[Dod1010]

The problem with introducing the term LTBH means that we could argue that that does not allow for tinkering, so I must say I thought that Gengulphus's early term, the one that Lootman suggested be simplified, was probably better.

Fundamentally though, I would simply like to get away from the idea that pyad's HYP guidance be followed as the only true path.

[Arborbridge]

The HYP practical board, was created primarily to discuss HYP (which is a specific term coined by Pyad) and its near cousins, has now spawned a group of Alt-HYers who want to take it over.

Can we allow this when there is a ready made board for them in HY Strategy? Why do such folk want two boards? and why can't they just accept what was the status quo rather than wrecking it for others who are perfectly happy to discuss HYP Practical matters centred around Stephen Bland's ideas. I suspect simple resentment towards someone who was such an inspiring writer.


Arb.

[Dod1010]

I would like it to be clear that there is certainly no resentment on my part towards pyad's ideas. They are not very original anyway except the odder bits such as Strategic Ignorance and hanging on to shares long after their sell by date. Few investors would really practise either if they were working things out for themselves. I suppose if you were a true Doris you might and you can see from HYP1 that you will end up with a HYP which is dependent on a very few shares. I find that quite amusing considering the effort that goes in to diversification at the outset.

Ultimately I do not care, but I would prefer to see a Board with less proscriptions to it and as has been said by myself and others I would have thought the Lemon Fool would be a good opportunity to do that.