SIPP Performance Comparison ...

At the beginning of September 2014, we opened a SIPP account for my wife into which she pays a nominal sum each month, gets a little tax relief added and her employer also makes a generous additional contribution.

I've been managing this pot on her behalf from the outset, and I've been relatively cautious with the choice of investments since I'm very conscious that it's not my money I'm playing with here ...

The total monthly contributions are not huge and so previously I'd let them accumulate for up to six months before buying any assets, simply to reduce the size of the percentage which was lost to trading costs.   However, more recently the broker has changed its charging structure to a monthly fee which includes a trading credit.  These credits can be rolled over for a few months before they expire, but it effectively means there are now fewer barriers to investing smaller sums more regularly.

There are currently nine separate holdings in her SIPP and they're all collective investments - no individual shares at all - some of which are conservative wealth-preservation funds (e.g. RCP.L and CLDN.L) and some much more adventurous (e.g. SSON.L that was bought at the IPO late last year).  The account is almost fully-invested with only around 2% held as cash, and the weightings of the individual funds range from 2.8% to 15.9% of the portfolio total.

Dividends have been reinvested into the same funds from which they were received, and nothing at all has been sold since the account was opened in 2014, so it's very much been a buy-and-hold approach.  Recently, new money has been used for top-ups of existing holdings rather than opening new positions.

Anyway, I thought it would be interesting to compare the performance of her SIPP portfolio, and its softly-softly approach, with that of my own over the past five years.

So here's the performance of both portfolios :-

My wife's portfolio has roundly beaten my own - every metric of her portfolio performance beats mine except for the latest one-month return.


The figures may be slightly skewed by the really strong run my wife's portfolio has had so far this year, which of course also raises the annualised 3 & 5 year returns, but still it makes me think there might be some merit in taking a different approach to managing my own SIPP, e.g. less frequent tinkering, fewer holdings overall and being more fully invested (my SIPP pot is currently >25% cash) ...