The Lemon Fool

About to invest some savings in iShares Global Clean Energy ETF, the City of London Investment Trust and Monks Investment Trust (although less in the latter as I already have holdings in Allianz Tech and Scottish Mortgage). I'm new to investing - does anyone have any advice or thoughts on this? Perhaps I should hold for a while to see how the market plays out given current uncertainty (hence more savings to take advantage of any crash) or do I continue to plough more savings into the markets (the rest of my savings are held in AJ Bell Global Growth Fund)? I do have emergency cash set aside in an ISA set aside for a rainy day. Thanks in advance for any comments!

Investor2021 wrote:About to invest some savings in iShares Global Clean Energy ETF, the City of London Investment Trust and Monks Investment Trust (although less in the latter as I already have holdings in Allianz Tech and Scottish Mortgage). I'm new to investing - does anyone have any advice or thoughts on this? Perhaps I should hold for a while to see how the market plays out given current uncertainty (hence more savings to take advantage of any crash) or do I continue to plough more savings into the markets (the rest of my savings are held in AJ Bell Global Growth Fund)? I do have emergency cash set aside in an ISA set aside for a rainy day. Thanks in advance for any comments!

I'm not entirely sure why you have listed City of London under "Growth Strategies". Growth it aint!
If you want to invest in the UK market, then a simple FTSE all share tracker has out-performed CTY on a 5-year total return (32% vs 25%). And there are plenty of actively managed UK-only funds which have performed even better - especially in the mid cap and small cap fields.
And as for timing an entry into the market - there are always reasons as to why this is not the correct time. So the standard advice is to invest at regular intervals (e.g. monthly), whether the market is rising or falling.

If you have a long time ahead of you, just keep investing as and when you can afford to do so. Trying to time the market is unlikely to work out well.

Keep an eye on the management fees - you don't want high costs eating into your returns.

Don't put all your eggs in the UK basket (too many old economy stocks and too much political nonsense).

Consider VWRL, which is a low cost world tracker.

Some Investment Trusts include a bit of private equity, if you want to spice things up a bit.

You might want to think carefully about VWRL, inevitaby it has a high proportion of US shares which you may, or may not, feel have been a long bull run that could come to an end. If you have a long time scale then this shouldn't be a worry and you are prepared to see big falls eventually, however a mix of other ETF's maybe focused on emerging and old markets without the large proportion (55% including big chunks of Apple Facebook Alphabet Amazon et al) in the US that VWRL has, could be justified. Just a thought.

I agree with your views on Monks, which has done me very well and is a major part of my SIPP. I would also suggest some private equity in there somewhere, although I see you have some SMT already. Unless you need the income I would steer clear of CTY.

FInally, trying to time the market is impossible, so just filter in your investments over a period, but of course this could be the wrong advice. You have to just do what feels best to you. For what its worth I just invested my SIPP straight away after it was liberated from an emplyer scheme.

MM

MaraMan wrote:FInally, trying to time the market is impossible...

"“You can’t time the market” is one of the oldest cliches in investing.

Which is unfortunate, because it isn’t true."
https://www.investorschronicle.co.uk/news/2021/08/05/the-bias-against-market-timing/ (Free registration required)

However, as he does go on to say, "Short-term market timing is impossible" and you could be waiting a long time for the right conditions ... but if/when the FTSE yields more than 5% or the S&P has a PE of less than 10, and you have a 10 year view, then history shows you should fill your boots.

mc2fool wrote:

MaraMan wrote:
FInally, trying to time the market is impossible...

"“You can’t time the market” is one of the oldest cliches in investing.

Which is unfortunate, because it isn’t true."

https://www.investorschronicle.co.uk/news/2021/08/05/the-bias-against-market-timing/ (Free registration required)

Or there's the 'No registration required' method...

https://www.google.com/search?q=investors+chronicle+bias+against+market+timing

Cheers,

Itsallaguess

mc2fool wrote:
However, as he does go on to say, "Short-term market timing is impossible" and you could be waiting a long time for the right conditions ... but if/when the FTSE yields more than 5% or the S&P has a PE of less than 10, and you have a 10 year view, then history shows you should fill your boots.

I'll also observe that he's previously pointed out that equity marker returns tend to be seasonal, i.e. there is statistical support for sell in May and go away until ~Halloween, yet he's contradicting that in this article's "Short-term market timing is impossible" .