PinkDalek wrote:Similarly, I haven't checked the history as to how they arrived in HYP1 but Dixons Carphone only came into existence in 2014.
The history of HYP1's holdings up to is essentially the same as that of CHYP1's holdings up to (but not including) 2008 - they diverged significantly from each other while pyad was absent from TMF from early 2008 to somewhat over a year later, with the result that he maintained HYP1 and people on the TMF board reconstructed its exact composition as best they could and then tried to maintain the resulting "continuity HYP1" as pyad would have done. I say "tried" because there were three takeovers during 2008 and it turned out that we didn't second-guess him correctly on the replacement shares for any of them! As a result, the two portfolios were quite noticeably different by the time he returned - they still had a considerable 'family resemblance', but they were no longer identical or near-identical twins.
Anyway, after his year 9 report on HYP1 in November 2009, which made it clear that the current state of HYP1 once again had a 'presence' on TMF, there was some debate about whether to keep the "continuity HYP1" going. I decided that I was interested enough to take it over, set up a "1/8th scale model" of it in a Halifax ShareBuilder sub-account a la GDHYP (*), and maintain it from then on. I don't remember all of the reasons why I was interested, but a big one was the question of whether pyad had been particularly skilled about his share choices: that question had been raised on the board, and having versions of HYP1 run by him and by someone else might eventually help to answer it. (I should stress the "eventually" - what has happened since, in nearly a decade, has produced only one major source of different performances of the two portfolios, namely that HYP1 bought Persimmon as a replacement share for a takeover in 2008 and the "continuity HYP1" didn't. While that one data point might suggest that pyad has better sharepicking skills than average, it's certainly nothing like conclusive: HYP1's superiority in performance could easily be the result of pure blind luck in happening to make the with-hindsight-right choice between a number of near-enough-equally-attractive choices.)
To finish the process of taking over the "continuity HYP", I wrote the first post in
this thread in late 2009 to apply a final (**) set of corrections and summarise that had happened to the portfolio's holdings so far (the subject of that post somewhat unfortunately says "HYP1" - as far as I can tell, the acronym "CHYP1" didn't come into existence until pyad first used it a few months later - but the start of its text makes it clear that it was about the "continuity" version). Which brings me at last to the relevance to the quote above: the table at its end gives the history of HYP1's holdings up to early 2008. The relevant one here is the original Boots holding, which merged with (if I remember the name correctly) Alliance Pharmaceuticals to form Alliance Boots in 2006, and was then taken over. The replacement share was DSG International, which I remember had been Dixons until a renaming some time earlier. The subsequent history postdates that table, but is simple enough that I can remember it: DSG International renamed itself Dixons Retail Group, and then later merged with Carphone Warehouse to form Dixons Carphone.
(*) My reasons for doing that were that it would make certain that Halifax would inform me of any relevant corporate actions and prompt me to take any actions they require, and would also maintain accurate financial records of the portfolio. Missed past corporate actions had been a particular source of problems with reconstructing HYP1, and reconstructing its past dividend amounts the source of a great deal of tedious work: I knew I would sooner or later grow tired of them and give up maintaining the portfolio if those problems continued indefinitely into the future...
(**) Literally "final": as the post warns, any subsequently-discovered errors would not be corrected - it's just too difficult after the portfolio is in real-money form! And I did actually discover such an error during my archiving of TMF material earlier this year, which was to do with Anglo American's demerging of Mondi in 2007. At the time, we failed to find any record of how HYP1 handled that, and so decided to reconstruct it as best we could in the light of HYP1's established practice: we treated the resulting Mondi holdings as having been sold, both because they were tiny and because one of them was foreign, and we put the proceeds back into the portfolio with a top-up of Anglo American, the holding that produced them. However, earlier this year I discovered
this post by pyad, which reveals that he did indeed sell the Mondi holdings, but (a couple of posts further down) reinvested the proceeds in RSA rather than Anglo American. I don't regard this error as particularly significant - it doesn't affect which holdings the portfolios held, just the exact numbers of shares in them, and it's in keeping with the more major differences between the two portfolios in that it's a reinvestment decision made by two different owners. But FWIW, it is there and it means CHYP1 diverged noticeably (though not significantly IMHO) from HYP1 several months earlier than I previously believed.
Gengulphus