Mar ’26: Iran clobbers markets

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In March the rain stopped. We started March with North London already having seen 2x its usual rainfall for this point in the year. And thankfully in the middle of March, it stopped. As I write this I have actually needed to start watering the garden, something that felt a very remote prospect a month ago.

I’ve had quite a bit of travel in March. Some travel to the south coast. And some travel to the Alps.

Meanwhile out in the wider world, the US and Israel have been hard at Iran. I’m not going to comment on this madness except for what it’s done to the markets.

Markets in March

The market most impacted by the Iran war is the energy market. Diesel prices are up sharply; jet fuel is in short supply, and regular unleader is up significantly too. Americans, with lightly taxed fuel, are seeing a sharper increase (there is some justice in the world). Here in the UK unleaded has gone from c.£1.37/ltr to £1.57/ltr; this is a spike but not the end of days.

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Feb ’26: Before Iran

FIRE v London4 Comments

So, for the avoidance of doubt, the end of the month is the last trading day of the month. Which for February, meant Friday February 27th.

The fact that the Israelis and the Americans invaded Iran on February 28th is going to impact March, not February.

Which is just as well because I had quite a lot of activity in February.

Simplifying the portfolio, pt3

While the weather in the UK was pretty unremittingly miserable, I found myself rearranging quite a few of the portfolio’s deckchairs.

One of my longstanding and most thoughtful readers made a comment on my blog recently that resonated with me. @Grasmi is a Brit who has emigrated abroad – to Australia, so far as I can gather. He is a bit further ahead of me on the path to portfolio enlightenment, and here is what he said:

I vastly simplified my portfolio years ago. I’m down to 8 positions now (7 ETF’s and BRK – so basically 8 ETFs). Never looked back. Less levers to pull = less stress and “busy work”.

After doing the cleanup a long time back, over time you basically “can’t” fiddle any more due to CGT… which is a lot of ways is quite freeing. There’s always a temptation to do something, but once you’ve got large accumulated CG’s in a simple portfolio, that urge goes away. Any change you make needs to make back the cost of any CGT bill (for me this is 20-30%+) just to break even, so I’m very reluctant to make any changes.

Longtime readers will know I went through a concert effort at simplification back in 2020. What I’m left with is about 90 unique holdings held across 9 brokers (6, really; 3 of them are offshore bonds/equivalent that I barely touch and don’t need to file tax reporting on). As at the end of 2025, only 64 of these holdings were in unsheltered accounts – i.e. accounts that need tax filing.

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AI comes to FI

FIRE v London5 Comments

Rishi Sunak, the former UK prime minister and current Sunday Times journalist, observes that every CEO is talking about AI – so why aren’t political leaders? So it seems a good time to bring some AI into the world of FI blogging.

Large Language Models such as ChatGPT have been mesmerising, but it doesn’t take long playing with them to realise they are much better with Language than with Numbers. However with the latest models bringing more inference into their logic that is starting to change.

I’ve been playing with Claude and Gemini in the context of my portfolio and blog. They are proving genuinely useful. For reference, I am a paying customer of both – and am using Projects/Gems to partition my experimentation and (I believe) avoid uploading key financial data into their wider cloud/models.

Key tasks AI has proven useful for so far (UPDATED 21 Feb) include:

  • Take my 24/25 tax return and estimate my tax bill for the next financial year. Gemini notably better than Claude on this one.
  • Review a 24/25 tax return for errors. A HNW friend of mine found a £100k error in his accountant-prepared tax return using Claude.
  • Update dividend yields and TERs/OCFs in my master portfolio list. This is a task made for Claude.
  • Estimate the next set of dividends I can expect – based on a screenshot of my portfolio – good dopamine hit!
  • Disaster scenarios – examining the disaster scenarios my portfolio faces, and the warning signals for each

As a taster I’ve appended below what Claude said when I asked it what Warren Buffett/Charlie Munger would think of my portfolio.

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