Three years later - what happened in that time?

 It's now June 2021, and Investimouse finds himself wondering why the blog hasn't been updated for a couple of years. What happened? 

April 2018 saw Investimouse divest quite a bit and with the sale of property back home in NZ was able to move out of the humble abode and into a proper dwelling again, with a garden, garage, and nice neighbours. Lovely stuff. 

So it was a case of starting again with the iWeb ISA.

I sensibly held onto Apple and Fundsmith. Along with those winners, I chose to keep BCPT (the commercial property REIT - disastrous following COVID), an index-linked GILT fund, and  HINT (an international income trust). Three other fixed income instruments survived the cull too, NWBD, LLPC, and SQN (now renamed KKV). 

It was revealed last year, that SQN was sitting on a pile of nothing and the assets held were nowhere near the valuation the fund managers claimed. Change of manager and name (KKV) and they've decided to run it down to zero and end the fund - slowly getting some money back from it as they sell assets but a lesson well learned. Never put money into finance companies. They are con artists on the whole and far too prone to mistakes, misadventure, and lying. 

The ISA has steadily been added to over the last few years with an Emerging Markets bond ETF, LGITI (the global ex-UK trust), Unilever, Computacenter, and an Asian income fund. It seems like a hotchpotch and I could probably replicate it with a global ETF and a global bond ETF, but once in Apple and Unilever, it seems mad to sell them. 

Then in Jan 2020, I found Trading212 and the appeal of an app along with no commission on share buying meant, that last year's ISA was put there. Got to say they've been brilliant so far, speedy buying, access to loads of markets, fractional shares, and pies. Fractional shares are a game-changer, meaning you can get access to expensive shares like Berkshire Hathaway and Amazon without emptying the entire bank to get one share.

So I've also built up a tiny nest egg in T212 with 7 pies:

Artificial Intelligence

Diggers

Dividend

Future

Quality Growth

Trust Me

UK Tech

Just to mention again, Pies in Trading212 allow you to build a group of shares into a mini-fund of your own. You assign each holding a % of the pie and then future funds and dividends will be invested in each holding at that percentage. And with fractional shares, it means you can drop small amounts (say £20) and the money is still able to be invested in your pie. So a Pie with a bunch of tech shares in it can act like SMT without having to pay any OCF (fees).  

I'll save going into the detail of each one for later posts, but probably fairly obvious where I'm going with each of them.