tjh290633 wrote:I have to agree that in general one should ignore day to day fluctuations in share prices. Every now and then most of us will experience a catastrophic drop. Marconi was my first one, followed by British Airways in 2003.
Then we have to move on to 2009, when Mapeley was the first to suffer, then there was a whole string of them, as dividends were abandoned wholesale, and I jumped from DSGI, Trinity Mirror, Premier Foods and Rentokil. More recently we have had Cattles and Carillion, and perhaps Pearson.
2009 took a bit of sorting out, but the recovery came. I always like to repeat my table of dividend per income unit at such a time:. Ordinary
Year to Divs/unit
05-Apr-88 2.87
05-Apr-89 2.75
05-Apr-90 4.33
05-Apr-91 5.75
05-Apr-92 7.97
05-Apr-93 7.33
05-Apr-94 6.65
05-Apr-95 7.93
05-Apr-96 7.81
05-Apr-97 8.90
05-Apr-98 9.35
05-Apr-99 8.91
05-Apr-00 11.96
05-Apr-01 12.42
05-Apr-02 13.82
05-Apr-03 12.95
05-Apr-04 12.48
05-Apr-05 12.96
05-Apr-06 14.09
05-Apr-07 15.07
05-Apr-08 26.09
05-Apr-09 22.76
05-Apr-10 11.91
05-Apr-11 16.71
05-Apr-12 18.79
05-Apr-13 20.89
05-Apr-14 21.48
05-Apr-15 22.40
05-Apr-16 22.77
05-Apr-17 24.93
Here you can see the changes from time to time, particularly the 2009 and 2010 dips and the recovery. The big rise in 2008 was the result of moving into some of those high-yielding shares, to replace shares taken over, which let me and us down in the following year. Currently my yield is about 4.5%. Let's not write Carillion off too quickly.
TJH
Your long term record is fine but the performance during the late noughties recession is lousy for an HYP in dropping 54% over the two years from 08 to 10. That is so large that I suspect many HYPers would have abandoned the strategy in that situation. All HYPs will have suffered cuts back then due to widespread dividend slashing but I'd guess that yours is worse than most. The fault I suggest is tinkering.
Good that you hung in there in the face of that big setback but I suggest that it might have a lot to do with your not being a HYPer who depends upon the income and as a result can take a more relaxed view of the gig, experiment, mess around with tinkering etc.
This is quite untypical as most HYPers depend on the income, either now or will be doing so in future, and perhaps in that case need to consider their situation a little differently. They can't take the sort of extra risks that you can safely take on, though few here of the already few HYPers here seem to appreciate this point.