Investment Review - March 2020

Well, that first quarter of 2020 was certainly interesting ...

For a change, this time we'll lead with the progress graph rather than the spreadsheet summary.

(click on any of the images for a larger view)

In this first period of 2020, I've had three consecutive months of negative investment returns (-0.9%, -4.1% and a whopping -7.9% in March), resulting in large falls in the combined portfolio value.    

Mind you, in the middle of March the monthly return looked like it could possibly end up at -15% or even worse, but a bounce from the start of the fourth week means the portfolio value today is back to the same level it was in February 2019.  

But I'd been waiting for some sort of a dip, even though its size was totally unexpected, and so I've used some of the cash in the accounts to buy more equity funds.

There may well be more more falls to come in this slump, and many businesses will likely never recover from the effects of the forced closures, but from within the depths of today's doom and gloom there still seems to be upside potential for equities.

The glass is still half full.

Building a new Greenhouse - Part 1 - Six-on-Saturday

In the early spring of 2013, we built our large greenhouse using 14 shower panels we'd picked up on the cheap.   

This 12' x 6' 6" (3.6 x 2.0 m) building has served us extremely well for the last seven years, but during the winter we made a decision to demolish it and re-use the glass panels to make a similar smaller greenhouse in a slightly different location.  There were a few reasons for this :-

• some of the greenhouse roof beams are suffering from rot which may soon become a structural problem, so they'd have needed replacing anyway.

• we want to reclaim the corner of the garden where the larger greenhouse is currently sited.  With the greenhouse removed, it's a large paved area surrounded by a concrete plinth, so it's an ideal place to plant some shrubs either in large pots and / or by selectively removing a few of the paving slabs and planting directly into the ground.

• by building a smaller greenhouse than the original, we can re-use all of the glass panels and make it glass-sided all around - at present, the back (north) wall is made from timber, and although we'd faced the panelling with reflective aluminium foil insulation, the back side of the greenhouse is still a little dark. 

I could have removed all the glass panels, and then just modified the existing carcass to make a smaller greenhouse, repairing the roof in the process, but I think that's actually much more work than building a new framework from scratch.  It would also have been very heavy to move, even though it's not far to drag it over to its new position.

So, before our recent holiday, I'd drawn up plans for a new 8' x 6' (2.4 x 1.8 m) greenhouse and prepared a base using paving stones I'd recovered from elsewhere in the garden.  

new greenhouse base area cleared and levelled ...

Not waving, but drowning ...

The huge scale of the stock market falls over the last three weeks has actually resulted in two of my individual brokerage accounts being underwater when compared to the initial sums invested.

Below is the performance of each of the accounts, simply showing their current value against all of the cash ever added to them - the dates in brackets are the periods in which contributions were made.   They're not adjusted for inflation or anything else ...

• ISA 1 (2007-2010), +79.8%

• ISA 2 (2010-2013), +0.8%

• ISA 3 (2013-2017), +15.2%

• ISA 4 (2017-2020),  -9.4%

• SIPP (2010-2020),  -3.9%

Lockdown in Tenerife ... updated

Today is Day 19 of our planned 28-day break in Tenerife.

We went out earlier this afternoon on our hired motorbike.  It seemed quiet on the streets, but it's Sunday and today's the first day since we arrived when overcast conditions have persisted into the afternoon, so I didn't read anything unusual into it.  The sky's clearing up now, and it looks like it'll be a nice evening as usual.

We rode up to the east side of Los Cristianos, near to where all the motorhomes park up for the night, and went onto the rocks for a spot of fishing.   We've been there a few times in the last couple of weeks, and many times during previous trips here - this time, we've seen motorhomes registered in many other countries, and from as far away as Scandinavia and Bulgaria.  

A few other people were around, walking on the beaches or clambering over the rocks, but we were the only ones fishing today.

We'd been there for a couple of hours when my wife noticed a pair of police officers gesticulating from the car parking area, but we were a couple of hundred metres away and couldn't hear them above the sound of the waves, so we just ignored them.  Anyway, I had an idea what they might have wanted from reading the news last night ...

Thoughts on the Investment Portfolio ...

In the last couple of years, it's fair to say we've experienced both good and bad periods of investment performance.

Today, the FTSE100 is hovering around 6,000 which is a year-to-date fall of 20%, but my combined portfolio return is 'only' down by 7.5%, so I suppose it's not doing too badly in the grand scheme of things.

Psychologically, it's best to think of losses in percentage terms because even 7.5% represents a shitload of the actual folding stuff !  

So what have we learnt ?


1)  Well, some holdings don't seem to contribute much to the portfolio under any circumstances :-

RCP.L was bought a few years ago as a 'defensive' holding, but despite its track record over longer time periods it hasn't done very much at all for my portfolio.  It doesn't throw off anything significant in terms of a dividend, it doesn't produce much of a capital gain during rising markets (fair enough) but it didn't provide downside protection during the recent sharp slump either, falling by almost the same amount as the markets. 

Although to be fair, it hasn't actually lost me money yet in nominal terms at least, it certainly hasn't displayed the more defensive qualities I'd expected in terms of holding onto at least some of its gains from the good times, which is my own fault for not sufficiently researching its composition.  I might as well have just kept the cash in the accounts for several years.

However, I'm keeping an eye on it now - when / if the markets return to some sort of normality, I'd expect RCP's price to have risen too, due to its equity components and maybe the re-establishment of a premium to its NAV (although that could take a long time for many of the stricken ITs).  I'll then probably sell out and either hold the proceeds as cash or re-invest in something like CGT.L.