Dod101 wrote:Every so often I look at this much recommended unitisation business but like ElectronicFur I withdraw all my dividends to live off and the portfolio is self contained with no or very little new capital going in and almost none coming out. I have thus never seen the point in unitisation although I suppose with the very few such transactions, it would not be much work.
OTOH I am not sure what it would achieve and I am not a spreadsheet addict. I simply track my dividends on an annual basis, and I want two things, a steadily increasing cash amount and I want to know the yield on the year end value. Of course I use a pivot table to analyse my dividends, but that is it.
Stats and info are only of use if you are going to use it to help improve the outcome.
Dod
I can see your POV, and it's right for you. You developed your ideas years ago and if it works well enough to provide your income, I can see why you don't bother to measure anything. You do sacrifice some information: for example, you probably can't answer the question: am I investing more effectively than a professional manager. I believe you can only find that by unitising or perhaps by XIRR for TR.
However, my position was more like TJH's comment: I wanted to test how well my investments - in particular HYP, which I had just begun - stacked up with regard to other ways of investing my recently obtained pension pot. After all, HYP was new and experimental for me, so I needed to check what was going on.
As he put it: "to make sure I was not deluding myself".
The difficulty in trying to compare my portfolios up to that time was: how to handle new cash input? If one has a clsoed system with no inputs or outputs, there isn't a problem. But in my case of "portfolio building" there
was, and that's why I leapt on the idea when someone explained how to unitise.
Eventually, I will probably stop because I will have learnt all that's necessary - but given that my system is set up and takes little effort, I'll carry on for the time being. It is still the only way I can compare my portfolio performance with professional ones, or with a basket of other funds such as ITs and OEICS.
Arb.