10 April 2016

Investment Review - March 2016

Well, the first quarter of the year's gone already.   Here's the current Combined Portfolio position, as on the last day of March :-


Click on it for a larger image, although I think you'll need to click on '..read more..' first.


Commodities stocks ended the quarter at unexpectedly high levels given they were still dropping like stones throughout January and early February, at which time I took the opportunity to load up with some more of my favourites (see below).

However, in early March their valuations were even higher than now, and after I'd averaged down I was hoping for some of the bigger mining holdings to actually creep into profit territory, at which point I might have bailed out of a percentage of them, but they've since come off the boil again and so I'm still holding onto them

The commodities revival has lifted the portfolio to new highs for the last two months of the period, the previous high occurring at the end of May last year.  

March was also a good month for dividends, I think only May and September will top the payments I received last month.


Stock / Fund Sales in the Period
None.

Stock / Fund Purchases in the Period
In early February, I averaged down big-style in two of my mining holdings, BRWM.L at 173.51p net and RIO.L at £17.01 net.

I also did the same with my holding in JRS.L, adding more at 273.15p net.

Anglo American (AAL.L) turned out to be the one that got away...   I'd been watching its slide for months and I should have bought in long before it bottomed out at around 221p, but even though it hovered at this very low level for a good few weeks, I dithered for far too long and it was sharply on the rise again soon after.  It was trading at 550p at the end of March.... ah, well.


Historical Performance
I've now been recording end-month combined summaries in the above tabular format since October 2014, but the raw data is available in other formats for many years prior to thenIncorporating this earlier information, I've compiled a historical picture of the monthly pot valuations back to March 2013, the baseline valuation date:-



This graph better shows just how challenging things were for most of the previous twelve months, because the long period of stagnation continued even when quite large sums of new cash were regularly being added to the pot, but it wasn't enough to counter the falls in market valuations ...


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