Arborbridge wrote:I've been away for just a week sailing - and what did I miss?
My HYP has dropped 2% and my forecast income has taken a knock too. That's a big change but the world doesn't seem any different.
Take a look at a FTSE100 chart for the last 6 months, e.g. the one at
https://markets.ft.com/data/indices/tea ... s=FTSE:FSI. That shows the index varying from a bit under 6700 to a bit over 7200 over the period, so a 1% change to it has been fairly close to 70 points throughout the period. Since you're interested in 2% changes in a week, look for movements over about a week (5 of the vertical bars at the bottom of the chart) by about 140 points (a bit under one and a half vertical divisions on the chart). I count about three upwards such movements and five downwards (that's to my eye - some are a bit borderline, so other people's counts may vary a bit).
Drag that chart sideways by about four times its width, to take it back to a similar period about 2 years ago. The index values back then varied from a bit under 7100 to nearly 7700. So 2% changes were ones by about 150 points then (i.e. roughly one and a half vertical divisions rather than a bit less, but that's a difference that is well within the variations of quick 'eyeballed' counts such as I'm doing here). I count about five upwards and four downwards such changes in those 6 months.
Repeating that exercise after going back another 2 years, I find that a vertical movement by about one and a half vertical units is again a 2% change, and I count about three downwards and two upwards such movements in those 6 months.
The point of all that is that portfolio falls by 2% over a week
and rises by 2% over a week are
completely normal stockmarket behaviour, even for portfolios of very large companies, and not a phenomenon that has emerged since Covid. That doesn't by any means mean that they'll happen every week - but
expect both the rises and the falls to happen a few times in any half-year, so that one happening is hardly a noteworthy event, especially for a HYPer with a long-term outlook... If I were a HYP doctor, I'd be tempted to prescribe an early start to No-look November! ;
-)
The forecast income having dropped is a bit more noteworthy for a HYPer, I think. I suspect that the somewhat more cautious (and IMHO realistic) noises emerging from government about Covid prospects for the coming winter have been causing analysts to revise their forecasts downwards more than upwards - but that is just a suspicion, nothing more definite than that.
Gengulphus
