Newsletter – June 2024

• UK Election – Should Investors Worry?
• Four New Portfolios
• WTF (What’s the Fact?) – Smashing Chimenea
• Performance & Costs Update

Click Here to Watch the Video Version of this Newsletter

UK Election – Should Investors Worry?
Rishi has finally pulled the rip-cord, so we here in the UK will be bombarded with a slew of political noise for the coming weeks.

After months of uncertainty, the really big investors (insurance companies, pension companies and the like) are now able to focus on the snippets of political noise that will have implications for how much profit they can make.

This has little, if anything, to do with the investment outlook for folk like you and me. Hence I’m not going to take much notice of stock and bond prices lurching up or down over a few months. I’m in it for the long-term.

The one point that is of most interest to me is to do with tax-efficient investments such as ISAs and SIPPs. If the next incumbent of Downing Street, most likely to be Keir Starmer, decides that these need to be changed, then that would get my attention.

I’m not sure that he will do anything too drastic on this score for a couple of reasons.

Firstly, he won’t want to spook voters who have moved away from the Conservative Party. Well, not until he’s been in a while at least.

Secondly, the UK doesn’t provide state pensions to its citizens in any meaningful form. That’s one of the reasons why the housing market has done so well because the UK culture encourages buying a house, paying off the mortgage and using that as a pension pot.

Now that property is priced out of reach for so many people, the need for SIPPs and ISAs is extreme. They also constitute a much cheaper pension solution for the government than setting up a meaningful state pension.

Four New Portfolios
I’m in the process of setting up four new portfolios as follows:

• £50,000 Higher-risk rated growth portfolio
• £50,000 Medium-risk rated growth portfolio
• £10,000 Medium-risk rated growth portfolio
• £25,000 Income-generating portfolio with lower risk.

These should help to show you how it’s possible to invest with different circumstances.

WTF (What’s the Fact?)
I’ve bought a new Chimenea.

It reminds me of the aliens from the 1970s Smash adverts. This comparison is more effective on the video version of the newsletter.

Performance & Costs Update
My portfolio to date: +15.27% gross, +13.66% net (after costs).
Industry average (3,999 firms across 2023) +2.82% gross.

That’s a really good performance from my portfolio after one year. In fact, it’s too good to last. I fully expect the growth to halt or even reverse because I’m following what goes on in the general markets. I expect that to rise over the long term, but THERE WILL BE ups and downs along the way.