My Current Low Charge Portfolio – June 2010

Buying (New money): Since my last post I have had a good month of savings and managed to save 72% of my after tax earnings and pension salary sacrifices. Total new money entering my Retirement Investing Low Charge Portfolio was around 0.8% of my total portfolio value. The allocation was as follows: 42.0% to cash, 8.7% to UK equities, 12.2% to international equities, 2.3% to index linked gilts and 34.8% to UK commercial property. This money was invested outside of tax wrappers and also within a pension.

UK Property Market – May 2010 Update

David Cameron, George Osborne and others are I guess as I write this post working hard trying to pull together the emergency budget that will take place on the 22 June 2010. We have already seen in the press plenty of commentary about the possible increases to Capital Gains Tax (CGT) and the effect it may have on property prices, particularly the Buy to Let (BTL) brigade out there. Personally I’m not seeing them doing anything to engineer a crash (or even significant reductions in values). This is for a couple of reasons:

Buying Emerging Markets Equities

Yesterday I rebalanced my Retirement Investing Today Low Charge Portfolio by moving 0.6% from cash into emerging markets equities (ie buying equities with cash). Emerging market equities are an important part of my portfolio as I explained here.

Investing mistakes I’ve made – not considering investment fund fees

When I first started investing in the stockmarket I was extremely naive. The first thing I did was a search for the share funds that had given the highest return over the past few years. (What is it they say as a warning on many investments – past performance is not necessarily a guide to future performance or similar – I really was naive). Of course that was an actively managed fund. I have now changed my opinion and where possible only buy passive index tracking investments in my retirement investing low charge portfolio in vehicles like Exchange Traded Funds (ETF’s). I won’t go into the justification for passive versus active in this post today as there is plenty of information out there on the web already. A Google search of ‘passive versus active investing’ or ‘Bogle investing’ would be a good start for those that are interested.

Gold Priced in British Pounds (GBP) – May 2010 Update

In absolute terms gold continues to climb in value reaching a new high of £839.93 (when compared with my monthly historic dataset which goes back to 1979) since gold started its upward climb in 2005. In the last month gold is up £90.32 an ounce however in real (inflation adjusted) terms as shown in today’s chart gold it is up ‘only’ £83.32 per ounce. In real terms that’s an increase of 11%.