Portfolio Review - 2013

Man,its been ages since I posted on Investimouse. Shame on me. I've still been active in the market and trying to make more money through investing, saving and financial austerity, yet the real world, and work have intervened to stop me posting.

Anyway, how did 2013 go for the Team Dave Fund of Fun-ness portfolio?


The fund ended up 20.51% in 2013. Damn pleasing and the best performance since 2010. Considering the number of fixed interest holdings and dividend income shares I have now this seems a very impressive performance. But how did it do against the benchmarks? After all, unless you compare yourself to the market, you may as well have been buying a single FTSE100 tracker or similar.

According to Google Finance:
- the FTSE100 was up 13.9% for 2013.
- the All Shares Index was up 16.2% for 2013.
- the S&P500 was up 38.1%
- the World Index was up 26%. (although I'm not sure if this is accurate - struggling to find a perfect measure).

Clearly the place to be was the US in 2013. I've been gradually reducing my exposure to the US (mistake!) as I felt it was incredibly over-valued. The PE for the S&P is a good 25% above the average and that has to mean that things are going to go wrong soon, or so I thought.

The continuing improvement in the World Index continues to nag me. My portfolio consists of a bunch of investment trusts and low cost emerging country tracker funds that could probably all be done away with and replaced by the iShares World Index ETF.

Investimouse holds its shares in the Team Dave Fund of Fun-ness ISA through the iWeb platform. Loads of changes are happening right now due to the implementation of RDR in the UK, basically meaning we all pay a bit more for buying funds, holding shares, etc in our ISAs. I'm sure this wasn't the intention of the good natured law makers but that's what is going to happen to me. I've investigated moving the ISA again but feel that overall iWeb will probably still be just about the best platform to stay with for the size of my holdings. Plus the drama of it all when moving last time from iii to iWeb has put me off ever wanting to do it again!

The last time I had to shift platforms I produced a Google spreadsheet that was a big online hit with people caught up in iii's platform fee charges. This time the good folks at Monevator have an excellent comparison tool that could help you with figuring out who to hold your shares with and place your transactions through.