July ’26: An IPO, and France

It feels as if the World Cup was ages ago, already. Yet only a few weeks ago, I was gripped. And for once I thought England had a world-class side…. but hey ho, football hasn’t come home for another four years.

I had a road trip through France in July, which was lovely. I am pleased to report that the infrastructure for charging electric cars in France is considerably ahead of what we have in the UK – not least because of the EU rule that you have to be able to just ‘pay as you go’ with a credit card, without signing up to some irritating app.

Meanwhile, the Iran conflict rumbled on, and the market’s jitters about AI continued too.

Markets in July

My weighted market benchmark rose marginally on a constant-currency basis, but fell by 0.8% allowing for currency movements. US and International markets generally didn’t have a great July. USD and EUR both fell slightly against the GBP. Whereas UK equities had a surprisingly robust month – with strong corporate earnings, and mutterings about a ‘safe-from-tech-nonsense’ quality being appreciated about FTSE. ASX was up over 2% too, tho I haven’t followed the reasons why.

My portfolio in July

My portfolio returned -1.3% for the month, slightly worse than my market benchmark. At this point a trend is emerging – I have lagged my market benchmark significantly over the last 12 months, whereas normally I track is pretty closely; the arithmetic total (which is a rough-and-ready measure only) of my last twelve months’ returns are +12%, vs the market’s +16%. I know one key reason for this but need to pay more attention to understand the reason for my underperformance.

I also had an unusual development occur in my portfolio – an angel investment I made many years ago went public in the USA. It has delivered a good multiple of the c.£10k I originally invested, though in fact the effective annual return (IRR) is ‘only’ 24%. There is more to say about this angel investment, and what happens when such a holding goes public, that I may cover in a future post. In any case, now that it has become a liquid investment, I am adding it to my invested portfolio – whereas before I would have ignored it, as I do all my illiquid angel investments.

This (formerly) angel investment now has a six figure value; and it has shifted a couple of my allocations a bit. It leaves me more overweight in USA equities than I would like, and very much back in my target leverage zone. I am also significantly underweight in Fixed Income, despite seeming to reinvest dividends constantly into VGOV etc.

I am struggling with how to reduce my USA equity exposure. Most of it is outside my tax-sheltered accounts, and sitting at a significant taxable capital gain (the former angel investment being a case in point – this was not covered by the UK’s EIS tax breaks). I could trim my SIPP/ISA holdings, but those are underweight USA Equities anyway so I am resisting doing that. I am hoping that at some point, Something Will Come Along.

Appendix: Press clippings