This time last year Mel and I had been investing since March of 2018, and since it was the end of the year I decided to extract a snapshot of the combination of our two ISAs and post it here. One of the suggestions I received from several people was to unitise our portfolio. A few people gave me tips on how to do this, so after initialising our consolidated portfolio at £1.00 per accumulation unit (we don't draw income, so I decided not to calculate income units) I now calculate the new unit price on the last weekend of each month, and generate reports on the holdings in general. As we've now had a complete year since I last shared this I decided to post again with how our portfolios are currently doing. Here are our current holdings firstly sorted by P/L:
Again by market value of each holding:
Alas yes, we are very "overweight" in ULVR shares. I very stupidly topped up a while back when they were about £50 per share (yes I know, very silly!), and then when they fell to £42-43 I averaged down and bought again. So I'm certainly not planning on topping them up again for another year or so!
So overall, using my approximate per-month unitisation, our portfolio has returned about 22% this year.
The losers
Unfortunately, not all my decisions from earlier on were necessarily, good ones, in my opinion. I had bought into Burford Capital (BUR) 3 times (fortunately never at more than 1497p), and this was another lesson in inadequate research, after BUR were exposed by the short seller Muddy Waters as being somewhat of a smoke and mirrors band. We had also bought 3 separate tranches of Imperial Brands (IMB) stock in since 2018. We reasoned that the diversity which they added was good, and were somewhat fooled by IMB's investments in MJ as being more significant. However, my viewpoint on the industry as a whole, has altered since our first purchase, and hence we ended up selling out in 3 sales at between 35%-40% loss IIRC.
Other disappointments
In addition we completely sold out of Zytronic (ZYT). Buying this in the first case was probably a rooker error. I was tempted by them having a decent yield (about 5-6%) and being cash-rich. But I knew nothing about illiquid AIM stocks being brutal, when they profit warn. We were also building a reasonable holding in Advanced Medical Solutions (AMS). I still believe these guys are a good firm, but I'm now thinking that their products (wound care) are somewhat commoditised, and I hadn't considered how hard they would find making it in the US, and realised that this should have an influence on my buy pricing. After they profit warned, I spent sometime reading their last couple of communications (RNSs and ARs) and reading around (e.g. ADVFN), and figured that I would cut back 70% of the holding (this amount may have been a bit drastic, but I'd recently been BURned by the AIM mentioned in my last paragraph.
Top slicing and silly sales
I must admit I foolishly top-sliced about 15% of our MSLHs holding at 702p. Yes this has since travelled to 871p, making it a "bagger" in one of our ISAs. I'm only happy that I didn't slice anymore, and that I did manage to reinvest the capital returned into reasonable sane alternative stocks. My next silly sale, was selling out of National Grid (NG.) at about 841p. Yes like a great many, I was concerned by Corbyn-Mania!! Fortunately I did redirect the funds at my first ITs Polar Capital (PCT) and Greencoat Wind (UKW) both of which have performed since purchase.
Other news
We have also sold out our Legal and General Undated bonds at only a £8 nominal loss, and we sold out of our 72NS BT Group bonds, after slowly realising that many of the "investment strategies" books we'd digested were probably written in the bygone days when half decent bonds could yield significant returns. Our current plans with our remaining 3 small bond holdings is just to quietly let them mature and pay out.
Generally, trying to add more, hopefully decent quality stocks mainly those promising some growth and income, but also looking at any stocks which I believe have "value" possibility too, i.e. look oversold or have just had a new lease of life and will pick up.
Finally, I'm trying learn lessons from what I think I've most noticeably done wrong so far, here goes:
- Avoid under capitalised AIM stocks
- You can't do too much research
- The trend is your friend
- Try to wait until falling knives have finished dropping
- Don't sell as much!
- But sometimes you've got accept when you got it wrong and have to cut out a loss