What to teach your 20-something self, about pensions?

FIRE v London14 Comments

I have volunteered to do a simple class at work for a few younger folk about pensions.  I’m promising them Five Simple Things to know about pensions / saving.  What should I tell them?

My audience are young, ambitious Londoners.  They earn between £20k and £40k.  None are yet parents.  All aspire to get on the housing ladder.  They are smart but not obviously financially literate. They know pensions are an important matter but it wouldn’t be urgent for any of them.

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Anatomy of a portfolio’s excellent returns

FIRE v London2 Comments

In the 100+ investments that I can track in detail*, half a dozen made annualised returns of over 60% from 1/7/12 to 1/7/15.  In this post I’m going to examine these six investments in detail.

Under normal conditions, >60% p.a. returns can only come from active investments, not passive ones.  As such, these positions were all small – unfortunately, but sensibly.  But with such high returns, there are two questions I’m asking myself:

  1. How sensible was my logic, with hindsight? Was this skill, or was it luck?
  2. Should I have taken much bigger positions? Or would this have been just rank speculation?

FIREvLondon 2015 07 three years anatomy - winners

Let’s look at these six investments in no particular order.

Continue reading “Anatomy of a portfolio’s excellent returns” →

My investment returns in July ’15

FIRE v London2 Comments

A rare thing has just happened: Saturday is the 1st of the month, and my diary is clear.  So, before the July market prices have even cooled properly, I’ve updated my returns page here. The result?  In July I recovered most my June losses.  I should add that my June returns were about 0.5% worse than I first thought – though still not as bad as the markets I’m in.  So treat all these early numbers with caution.

There was pretty clear snapback in most markets, with Australia up over 4%, European-ex-UK, UK and USA equities all up about 2.4%, and fixed income up between 1-2% too.  I’d have been feeling pretty sour if I didn’t benefit from that.  No sourness here: I recovered about 2.3%  – exactly in line with the market returns.

My compound annual returns remain pleasingly high at 12% (since 1/1/13).  This feels a little too good to be true but then maybe I am more of a genius than I had realised (definitely not – Ed.).