Jan ’26: Greenland saga doesn’t disrupt tax bill

January media seemed dominated by Greenland and Davos. As part of my efforts to avoid amplifying unstable narcissistic media-whore leaders, I haven’t got much to comment about. London has been pretty wet and miserable, as is January’s reputation.

Meanwhile, markets were up quite a bit in January, for those of us measuring in GBP. This is despite widespread mayhem over Greenland – which the markets shugged off – albeit with a mid-month wobble.

My target allocation’s markets grew 2.4% on a constant currency basis. But their currencies fell by 1.4%, meaning my benchmark rose 1.0%. Against that my actual portfolio was flat. I am a little bit underweight USA equities, and a little bit overweight International equities, which in theory is not a bad tactical position to be in. In any case, I took a couple of hits on larger individual holdings.

Tweaking the portfolio

I made a few changes to my portfolio in January. One of the more significant was moving all my fixed income ETFs held with IB into their own subaccount. I have been meaning to do this for a while but the move gives me better optics into my various asset types and how much money they spit out / return.

I have also sold one of my Swiss equity holdings. The Swiss withholding tax arrangements aren’t properly supported by my brokers – so I don’t get a full tax credit for them – and moreover with ii you can’t actually trade CHF or Swiss equities online. I’m getting rid, of an ii holding at least.

I also can’t escape the conclusion that I would do as well, if not better, if my portfolio had only two holdings in it – VWRL and VGOV, for instance. I’m a long way from that, but I’m determined to track steadily closer to this ideal this year. My unsheltered accounts – which contain around 68 unique holdings – are harder to simplify because they incur capital gains, and most of my accounts do only have one holding per asset class. But for my tax sheltered accounts = with 27 unique holdings – in theory I could drop right down to two holdings tomorrow. Watch this space.

Death & taxes

January is tax payment month in the UK. My tax bill was slightly lower than I was dreading. I have funded it by borrowing from my margin loan – not for the first time – which remains slightly smaller than my target allocation would suggest.

Two more months of this tax year remain. I have been looking at opportunities for tax loss harvesting – few and far between sadly given the widespread gains across the portfolio.

Appendix: Press clippings