Investment Review - October 2014 Portfolio

I'm full of cold and feeling a bit under the weather, so I didn't fancy working today.  

Instead, I thought I'd create a new spreadsheet which pulls in the data from the various individual investment sheets, and take a look at the values and weighting of each component against the greater whole.

This new worksheet includes the SIPP and the various ISA accounts, current and historical, plus those bonds which are held outside.   I'm getting closer to the age when the SIPP could be drawn down against if I wanted to, so I'm simply lumping everything in here together.

However, the cash component in the worksheet only represents the cash held within the SIPP & ISA accounts and available for immediate investment, and not any other cash I have in accounts outside.


I still haven't transferred the £15k allowance for 2014/2015 into the current ISA account, and I'll probably wait until February or March unless the market takes a much bigger dip in the next couple of months, in which case it would be worth diving in earlier and trying to snap up some cheap stocks.  However, I'm still adding further cash into bonds and the SIPP on a monthly basis.  

I'll also consider buying more bonds (or bond ETFs) with the future SIPP contributions, because I don't have any at all in there at the moment.   If I ignore the SIPP components, there's there's roughly a 50/50 equity / bond split on the balance and I think I should be aiming for say 55/45 overall, to include the SIPP - it's currently 67/33 ...

Since this is an anonymous blog, at least to the wider readership, and I'm not showing any actual cash values here, then I thought I'd share both the components and the allocation information in terms of percentages.

The components are listed in descending order of their weighting.

The total growth figure of 8.5% only represents the increase in valuation of the current components over their initial gross purchase costs, and is not the 'overall' growth in terms of today's total pot value against the amount of money actually invested over time, which is very much higher.  There's a regular turnover of some of these components.

There's less cash than usual because several of the components are recent and speculative purchases, particularly the mining stocks, and I'll hopefully be able to bail out with a profit in the shorter term when they're trading higher than at present - big mining stocks tend to be quite volatile even in times of low wider market volatility.  However, if I do have to keep them for longer, then at least they're solid companies and good dividend payers.

A lot of red around in the list, particularly after the last month or so.  In terms of hard cash values, Tesco and the Russian securities represent the biggest hits I'm currently taking, but these were bought some time ago for the longer term.    The old Peter Hambro gold mining operations, aka Petropavlovsk, looks dead in the water at the present time but I'm hanging onto it and hoping for a miracle, because it's now worth so little that it's just too late to bail out.

An interesting exercise, with a total of thirty components across all accounts and including the available cash in those pots.  Thirty might be a few too many, but even a weighting of a couple of percent here represents quite a large chunk in actual cash terms....


Note that I'm not a financial adviser and none of the above constitutes financial advice - do your own research....