John123ab wrote:Itsallaguess wrote:
I initially held a large number of UK-market (FTSE100 / FTSE250) income-related investments, and have consolidated most of those into a small number of UK income-IT's, mainly Merchants (MRCH), City of London (CTY), Law Debenture (LWDB), and a smaller legacy holding in Edinburgh (EDIN).
Same thing for me here.
I could sell my FTSE100 div payers for these then I'd have less holdings to worry about I guess and then I can put it with my fidelity global dividend and just have fewer dividend paying holdings.
One of the big benefits for me personally with this type of move and consolidation into a smaller number of income-related Investment Trusts, and especially where it's enabled a big shift into a more globally-diverse set of income-producing holdings, is that it's completely removed a lot of the 'noise' that's generated from single-share holdings, and it's allowed be to make a much easier 'step away' from the mundane running of my earlier single-share portfolio, which always felt that it needed much closer attention than I was ever really wanting to give it, and that's before we even get into the riskier side of simply being exposed to single-share companies when compared to the risk-based advantages of holding income-producing IT's that are then, more often than not, holding an underlying set of hugely diverse set of holdings themselves...
I'm mainly talking here about things like regular RNS news releases, and corporate actions that seem to occur much more frequently than I ever liked them to, and then of course what felt like the regular 'corporate stumbling' that seems to occur with single-share holdings over the years, and especially where holdings have been bought-up as 'yield-chasing' exercises...
Just general 'attention sapping' features of single-share holdings that I came to realise I simply had no real interest in - all I really wanted was an opportunity to invest in areas of the global market that would hopefully deliver a useful yield-based dividend income, and with a broad, cross-cycle hope that over the years, that globally diversified income would tend to generally rise, and hopefully take underlying share-prices and capital investment with it at the same time.
And that's broadly exactly how things have worked out.
There's no free-lunch, of course, and I would never look to pretend there is. There's generally lower yields available in the income-IT sphere than might be available in some similar-sector single-share options (although note my earlier mention of 'corporate stumblings' when chasing yields...), and there's additional ongoing management charges to pay, and over long periods these are going to reduce long-term returns, but all I can personally say is that those charges are something I'm happy to pay for the other benefits that I've experienced, and if there's a single thing that I'd change when looking back, it's only that I would have made that shift away from single-company shares sooner...
I wrote a more detailed post about my income-portfolio evolution here, back in 2018, and nearly five years later, over a period where continued investment into my now very-much-preferred income-IT based approach has been considerable, all I can say now is that all the views presented in it have been very much validated for me personally over the years since it was written -
The one-way HYP revolving door -
https://www.lemonfool.co.uk/viewtopic.php?f=31&t=15438
Cheers,
Itsallaguess