Showing posts with label Emerging Markets. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Emerging Markets. Show all posts

Saturday 6 June 2015

My Investment Portfolio Warts and All

Two events have occurred in the past week that prompt this post:
  1. My Defined Contribution Company Pension transfer to a Hargreaves Lansdown SIPP has now completed.  The timings ended up being that I sent all the paperwork to Hargreaves Lansdown on the 09 May ’15, received a confirmation letter that it was in progress on the 13 May, the cash landed in my new Hargreaves Lansdown SIPP on the 29 May, I bought all my new low expense investment products (which made this post a little redundant) on the 01 June and the £500 cash back offer landed in my account on the 05 June.  So all in about a month for it all to wash through.  Total Investment Portfolio expenses including SIPP wrapper charges now run to 0.28% per annum.
  2. I received a Facebook message from a reader asking if I could do a post with “a really detailed breakdown of my portfolio starting with a rough pie chart with just equities, bond, gold, alternative investments, property etc and then a more detailed breakdown again perhaps an exploded pie chart of the main parts. For example share category American, European shares etc.”  When I read the message I realised that while I've talked ad infinitum about my portfolio over the years I've never given such a detailed breakdown including investment product percentages.
So without further ado here’s my investment portfolio warts and all.

The investment strategy (some might call it an Investment Policy Statement) on which my portfolio is based has now been in place almost since the beginning of my journey.  I first documented it in 2009 but I would suggest reading my 2012 strategy summary (as it included the addition of my High Yield Portfolio (HYP) for a portion of my UK Equities) in parallel to today’s post.  The strategy post will give you the “Why” behind my thinking while today’s post will give you the “What”.  It’s also important to note that nothing I do is original or clever.  It’s predominantly based on work by Tim Hale which is a book that I believe every UK investor should read with tweaks coming from the reading of the following books.

The Top Level Investment Portfolio

My Actual Low Charge Investment Portfolio
Click to enlarge, My Actual Low Charge Investment Portfolio

At a top level the portfolio contains local and International Equities, Commodities, Property, Bonds and Cash.

Saturday 14 August 2010

Adding more Emerging Markets Equities – db x-trackers XMEM

As I discussed yesterday my Emerging Markets Allocation in my Low Charge Portfolio had fallen to 3.2% against a target allocation of 5.0%. This was a variation of 37% against my target which was by far the worst of any of my asset classes. I’ve therefore used 0.8% of my total portfolio value held in cash to buy into the db x-trackers MSCI EMERGING MARKETS TRN INDEX ETF with ticker symbol XMEM on Friday afternoon. This gives me an allocation to emerging markets now of 4.0%.