Obfuscation

I’m not sure if it’s the COVID-19 lockdown affecting me, or whether this is really a thing, but over the past month or so I’ve started to really notice companies stretching their take on integrity.  Maybe I was just in a bubble before but for me if you don’t have integrity I don’t want to be anywhere near you.  Let’s look at a few examples that I’ve personally come across.

BT this week published their 4th quarter and year end results.  Within that were these pearls of wisdom - "In order to deal with the potential consequences of Covid-19, allow us to invest in FTTP and 5G, and to fund the major 5-year modernisation programme, we have also taken the difficult decision to suspend the dividend until 2022 and re-base thereafter.”

Now I know that lots of businesses are currently doing it tough but I just cannot see how BT can be worse off because of COVID-19 given we are currently in a world where the majority of communication can only be done via telephone or electronic data transfer.  My view, without having any knowledge of BT, is that the COVID-19 situation is just obfuscation from the fact that the board can’t figure out how to set pricing and manage their cost base to enable investment to stay competitive and give some cash back to the owners of the business.

I also take issue with term “re-base”.  It’s cut or reduce.  I’ve never heard anybody say I’m going to “re-base” my grocery bill.

Fortunately, other than in my FTSE100 tracker, I don’t own BT.

RateSetter is another.  When I first started investing with them they had products called 3 Year, 1 Year and Monthly.  Since then they’ve moved away from that model and amongst a few new products introduced a product called “Access”.

Given the current climate it’s no secret that P2P lenders are doing it tough.  I can accept that it’s so tough that lenders like me might start taking capital losses or even lose the majority of it.  After all with peer-to-peer it’s always stated that “capital is at risk”.

Rebalancing vs taxes vs expenses vs life

With us now being only a single working week away from the new UK financial year and the investment world still feeling the impacts of the COVID-19 situation I thought it might be worthwhile sharing a little about how my portfolio and life is changing given where we currently find ourselves.

Let's start with what my investing strategy, something I first shared way back in 2009 but wasn’t really finalised until 2012, tells me to do.  For this post there are three important pillars:

• If any of my assets, diversified by country and by asset class, gets more than 25% away from the plan then I will either sell or buy as appropriate to move that asset class back to plan
• Minimise taxes meaning I keep more of my wealth for myself
• Minimise investment expenses also meaning I keep more of my wealth for myself

It’s also worth sharing some other information that helped inform my recent decisions:

• My gold had become 25% overweight
• My bonds while not 25% overweight were well overweight
• The UK 2019/20 capital gains tax annual exempt amount is £12,000.  It’s also worth adding that I believe if you sell assets worth more than £48,000 or have gains before taking off losses of £12,000 then you will also have to complete the tax return capital gains summary pages.  Not a financial negative but a time waste worth avoiding if it sensibly can be.
• Once this COVID-19 problem passes it’s looking more and more likely that we’ll be Asian bound for the next part of our FIRE journey.  We’ve still not finalised plans, as we’ve learnt we have no need to rush these types of decisions, but we’re confident enough to start (continue?) shifting our asset allocation over the coming 6 to 12 months.  That involves moving our equity investment bias (may be controversial for some but it’s always been part of my strategy so I’m not changing it) from the UK (HYP, VUKE, VMID) to Asia mainly in the form of the Vanguard FTSE Developed Asia Pacific ex Japan UCITS ETF (VAPX).
• VAPX only went ex dividend/distribution on Thursday with all my Vanguard equity dividends/distributions being paid on the 08 April 2020.
• Within my portfolio I have pensions (all SIPP’s), an ISA, NS&I Index Linked Savings Certificates (ILSCs) and plenty of non-tax efficient investments. 

Lenses

A chart of the monthly FTSE 100 price looks something like this:

Click to enlarge, Monthly FTSE 100 Price

This is the chart that you’ll see on all the mainstream media channels and it shows that the FTSE 100 still has about 32% to fall if it’s going to match the worst of the global financial crisis (GFC).  This sounds like a long way until one thinks about a big failing with this type of chart.  It’s unit of measurement…  The FTSE 100 is priced in £’s and they’re constantly being devalued via inflation.  So, let’s take out a different lens and try and look at the chart in real, inflation adjusted, terms.

Firstly, let’s correct for the consumer price index (CPI):

Click to enlarge, Real (CPI) Monthly FTSE 100 Price

That shows that instead of falls of 32% being needed it’s actually closer to falls of 16% for parity with the worst of the GFC.

Perspective

If you were a trader on the financial markets, I’d think that you’ve probably had quite an interesting week.  After all the S&P500 is down 11.5% (an official correction without even going back into the declines of the previous week), our FTSE100 is down 11.1%, the Nikkei225 is down a more modest 9.6% while the ASX200 is down 9.8%.

Word on the street is that this has been caused by fear of what coronavirus, or to use its catchier name, COVID-19, could do to global financial performance, including the more than 1,000 companies contained within just those four faceless indices I’ve mentioned.  Years ago I proved I was a useless trader so with that in mind I’d also still suggest that some of the moves are caused by the coronavirus being a good excuse to have a market pullback given markets like the S&P500’s current hefty valuation.

Down market moves like this then give those of us who are paid to sell drama a great opportunity to come up with headlines like “Coronavirus meltdown: Airlines plunge as global stock markets suffer their worst week since the 2008 financial crisis” (I won’t link to the source of that one but if you’re interested Google is your friend) through to something a little more data driven like “Shares drop in worst week since financial crisis”

If you didn’t take personal finance seriously, articles like those might even be enough to cause you to panic (whether or not the first $100 billion trading day for the ETF SPY (an S&P500 tracker) was panic is of course debatable) with your own wealth or even not get started on the road to financial independence in the first place.

Insanity and 2019 in review

“Insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results” – not Albert Einstein as I always thought but actually Rita Mae Brown 

2019 represented my first full year of FIRE, albeit with a slip-up back to FI during the year, which was then later corrected.  Despite a lot of my pre-FIRE posts being financial in nature finances actually occupied very little of my mind through 2019.  Having my wealth increase by £148,000 and my spending, albeit profligate, significantly less than this certainly helped here.

What did occupy a lot of my mind, as regular readers will be well aware, was the psychological, emotive and decompression elements of FIRE.  So let’s start here first and take a snap shot of where I find myself.

Nearly 14 months into my decompression I would have to say that while the days are getting easier I am still very much deep in the decompression mud.  There are still many unanswered questions and much soul searching (or is that naval gazing) going on.  To help with that I’ve tried to continue with the human being while changing only one thing at a time theme I started mid-year.  One conclusion I’ve come to, and started to accept, is that it’s unlikely that I have a “silver bullet” single purpose in me and I’m really ok with that.  My purpose doesn’t have to occupy 60 hours per week, like my previous job, so why I was thinking that is beyond me.  Instead I’m starting to take great joy in many small “successes” that without FIRE I wouldn’t have been able to do.  That extra 3 miles of hiking into the forest, seeing something new, because I have the time...  That 3 hour lunch with a loved one that builds a stronger bond because I have the time...

The one change I have made is that an old friend asked me to help with a very short term very temporary job.  I never expected it to be purposeful (so it’s a job and not work) but I did think it would be interesting so took it on.  I just hope that is helping with my decompression and not clouding it.

2019 HYP Review

It’s now a little over 8 years ago that I started to build my UK High Yield Portfolio (HYP).  It was a much talked about strategy back in the Motley Fool forum days and today still gets plenty of attention on the Lemon Fool forums today.  I built the portfolio between November 2011 and July 2015 by which time I’d amassed 17 shares across multiple sectors.  That included a token amount of Royal Mail Group (ticker: RMG) during the initial public offering in 2013 and the spin-off of S32 by BHP in 2015.

Today the portfolio is down to 16 shares because of the forced Amlin sale in 2016.  It was set up to be close to a low tinker portfolio with only a few mechanical rules that would trigger a sale if there were big changes to a share.  For example if the actual value of a holding became 50% larger than the median share holding I would sell 25% (I’m looking at you Astra Zeneca, ticker: AZN, who is now 2.4 times the median) or if the actual dividend yield dropped below 50% of the FTSE All Share.

As it’s turned out to date I’ve done precisely zero tinkering unless forced by corporate events.  This means in 2019 there were again no buys or sells.  The complete HYP and the respective values of each share are shown in the chart below.  The purchasing rule that I followed while building the HYP was the amount of the next purchase was the median share value of the current portfolio (with the exception of RMG and S32).

Click to enlarge, Retirement Investing Today High Yield Portfolio