Month: September 2015

Why 2015/16 is the year of special dividends and how to find them

FIRE v London3 Comments

For the active UK investors amongst us, here is a short term strategy that could boost your returns in this tax year: position your portfolio for a bumper year of special dividends.

The UK government announced in July a significant tax hike on personal dividend taxes, taking effect in the next UK tax year (starting 5 April, for what are politely described as legacy reasons). This will increase wealthy investors’ dividend taxes by 7.5p in the pound. As this is a UK-only phenomenon, for the rest of this post I’m talking solely about UK companies.

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What a mess this blog has got us into – my Aug ’15 investment returns

FIRE v London3 Comments

I started this blog barely three months ago, and no sooner have I started it than my portfolio has just seen two of the worst months since I started tracking it systematically over three years ago.  June saw my invested portfolio drop almost 4%; I had a partial rebound in July, but now August has seen me drop by 4.4%.  My annualised percentage over 2.5 years has dropped from 12% to 9.8%, my maximum drawdown (peak to trough) is now -6%, and my Sharpe ratio (a measure of return for a constant level of risk/volatility) has dropped from almost 2 to close to 1.  Maybe my new blog has jinxed the global markets….

… and if it has, maybe I should start another blog.

In fact I am pretty thrilled with August.  My invested portfolio is down 4.4%, yes, but in fact this is great news for two reasons.

Continue reading “What a mess this blog has got us into – my Aug ’15 investment returns” →