Investment returns – Page 23

Jan 2021 review – spring cleaning underway

2021-02-01 FIRE v London6 Comments

The end of 2021’s first month.

January 2021 was quite an eventful month. Vaccine wars (amidst which, the UK has managed over 9m vaccines, thank goodness). Gameshop / WallStreetBets/ DeepFuckingValue memes. Trump’s coup over, Biden’s presidency now in place. Plenty going on.

Lockdown continues relentlessly in the UK. My area of London is proving to be reasonably compliant, to boot. Local covid-19 cases have halved since the early January peak, but remain far too high for comfort. Thankfully a large number of ‘oldies’ have been vaccinated, I know from personal experience, so with luck in a few weeks we will see that impact feeding through in the hospital statistics.

The markets ramped quite impressively in January, until they didn’t. The month end numbers suggest there isn’t much to see here – the month end hiding some quite vivid action.

In the meantime, I was very busy – trying to (partially, at least) replace my portfolio with one (ish) ETF. I’ll report on my progress below.

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Reducing my portfolio to one ETF

2021-01-232026-02-14 FIRE v London53 Comments

My last post, reviewing 2020, observed that my performance is, superficially at least, very similar to Vanguard’s WoRLd equity tracker ETF VWRL. That’s despite my portfolio involving a helluva lot more complexity/faff. My post elicited this comment from Bob:

Thanks for sharing, intriguing as always. As someone who recently (18 months ago) simplified my portfolio into three holdings: 1 VWRL seven figures, 2 [single megacap tech stock] six figures, 3 Vanguard Global Bond six figures. I find myself reading about your complexity and not feeling jealous one bit. So the question is, why do you dislike VWRL (or similar global tracker) so much? You mention the comparison several times, what is stopping you making the change? That is after all what reviews should lead to e.g. insights, and change.
Bob, commenting on 2 January 2020

Bob’s challenge is a good one. Why wouldn’t I just swap out my entire portfolio for, say, holding only a single world equities tracking ETF like VWRL or its non-Vanguard equivalents (see Monevator’s updated list of alternatives here, or the SRI alternatives listed on my ETFs page)?

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December and 2020 review, via seven questions

2021-01-02 FIRE v London16 Comments

The end of December 2020. Time to do my monthly review of my portfolio, but also time to do an annual review. It is the end of my eighth year of monthly tracking of my portfolio. And it’s the first year I’ve tracked that has a very serious market meltdown in it, triggered of course by the covid-19 pandemic.

While I am somewhat ~~geeky~~ unusual in the attention I pay to my portfolio, it is general good practice even for ‘normal people’ to review their finances and investments on an annual basis. In the spirit of trying to be helpful, I’m setting out in this post to tackle seven generic questions that I think all prudent investors should ask themselves at least annually, and where the answers suggest ways to optimise/enhance your outcomes.

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