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.
Anyway, back to the review.
Total investment return for the year-to-date is -12.4%, during a quarter where the FTSE100 has fallen by 24.8%.
And here's the combined portfolio summary sheet at close-of-business on 31 March.
Share / Fund Purchases in the Period
I mentioned in my 2019 Q4 review that there'd likely be a lower entry point during early 2020 for equity fund top-ups etc, and it duly arrived with a vengeance !
Buying activity only started in the latter half of the quarter and during our recent holiday - tethering the laptop to the mobile phone worked fine for online trading, using a cheapo dual-SIM smartphone plus a supermarket pay-as-you-go bundle with 10GB of roaming data.
Following this plan after the routs of the first week of the slump, here's a summary table of the FTSE100 weekly movements and actions taken :-
So 19 buy trades in total in just four weeks. Most activity was repeated top-ups of existing holdings, chasing them down as they kept falling, but I also opened three new positions; VUKE.L, BRWM.L as dividend plays and RDSB.L.
VUKE.L is an ETF, Vanguard's FTSE100 tracker.
I held BRWM.L years ago and it's been on my watchlist since I sold out. I bought in again after the severe falls of its two major constituents (RIO.L and BHP.L, both of which I've also previously held as individual shares).
And I wanted to take a punt on the oil price - it seemed unlikely it could go much lower (famous last words !) - but there appears to be no investment trust that is specific to the large-cap oil sector, so I bought RDSB.L despite my wariness of holding individual shares. The intention is to sell this only if / when the oil price recovers, but at these prices it yields well over 10% so hopefully I'll be paid to wait. Although there've been no dividend increases since 2015, during which time it sometimes wasn't fully covered by earnings, Shell hasn't reduced its dividend for a very long time and so hopefully the current CEO won't want a cut happening on his watch ...
Whatever happens, holding RDSB.L is also an effective hedge on our home heating oil costs - since we moved in here, we've paid as little as 31p per litre delivered and as much as 73p when oil was regularly trading at over $100 a barrel between six and nine years ago.
(I've just put an order in this week at 37p - we didn't really need any more oil yet, but who knows how long these lower prices will last).
Share / Fund Sales in the Period
None
Passive Income Index
Currently stands at 553.1, i.e. representing only 17.1% of last year's total income received, so we're well behind the 25% nominal mark at this first quarter point of the year.
Commentary
The year didn't start particularly well. The FTSE100 fell 3.4% in January, but things looked to be on the up again during February, until the very last week of the month.
During the week commencing 24 February, global equity markets suffered a very sharp fall, with the FTSE100 losing 11% during the week. This steep downward trend continued well into March. The third week of the slump was particularly severe, with the FTSE100 ending 17% down on the week.
Until that third week, although almost all of my portfolio funds had fallen in value, many had still managed to stay above the general level of the market decline. However, they all succumbed to the pressure in the end and are now down at least in line with the indices - in this second wave of severe falls, some ITs were hit very hard, as premiums disappeared and discounts widened in addition to the falls in value of their underlying assets.
I added a decent amount of new cash to the ISA in early February, but you wouldn't think so from the graph !
More new money went into the pot in early March - the end of the ISA year is nigh - and cash was king for a short while. However, the fund top-ups and new positions taken throughout the month have pushed cash levels firmly back into second place again in the portfolio weightings.
Most of my top-ups were in higher yielding funds, in an attempt to regain some of the passive income stream I'd lost from disposals made in 2019. This of course assumes that the underlying companies making up the funds will be able to sustain profits and dividends ...
So - the big question - where's the bottom of this slump ? Have we been through it already in March or are we in for another plunge during the next quarter ?
Stay safe out there ...
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