Quint wrote:Have we not reached the stage where we can agree that there are multiple ways of reaching the same goal. At a point in time some will look to perform better than others, one strategy will suit somebody better than another depending on their investing style and attitude to risk, age, financial liabilities etc.
What is wrong with using two or more strategies to achieve your goal, often easier if you have a larger portfolio and lower living expenses.
Life would be boring if there were only one strategy to investing and everybody did the same thing. It would make forums like this redundant (as well as lots of fund managers and people who write investing books and blogs).
I think you make very good points. Strategies success fluctuates.
We use, and have gradually increased the range as our knowledge and resources improved in the past four decades, a few strategies for various reasons. I like to pit my wits against the market(and Simon on the IC, although some of his stuff is too illiquid for me), which I do mostly in my small caps dominated trading account(second best performing of our portfolios), but we also like the steadiness of our HY ISAs, which have two strategies, hers (collectives mostly ITs) and mine(individual Cos, but lower yield than HYP, much better diversified across the market cap, because safety in the 'elephants' is a crock imho, as we have amply witnessed) . Our joint trading account is our US flavour portfolio, the best performing for a long time, but is in the process if being 'transferred' to the grandchildren. This is complemented by business investments, which are being sold too as I am reducing my load post recent bypass surgery.
What we do find out of all that is that the volatility of our overall returns(TR) is low, which we like. a fraction of the markets.
OK, I do have the time, I enjoy it, and it has not been a crime to both have studied hard and have specialisms in demand, and resulting good jobs to get us where we are having started with nothing but a fat overdraft, yes youngsters of today, us too all these years ago.
But it does get me down to keep reading on these boards about UK dominated income as the only way to skin that cat, for today's youngsters, a massive mistake looking to the next 30-40 years IMHO.
An exampe of strategies, or part strategies adapting: We read, often from TJH for example(and I have a great deal of time for TJ, we both re balance our HY efforts systematically for example, which I think is an essential way to play the in and out random nature of share popularity in an HY portfolio, and we have both kept proper performance unitised records for decades so that we can properly judge where we are at, but of course I do not agree with his HYP takes all view, the world of investing is way wider imho), that fixed interest is no good because your income does not increase, but you can make income, a lot of it if needed, out of gains. Well indeed I have little in fixed interest today, but boy in the middle of the financial crisis one could carefully pick magical yields, which on top gradually where topped up by massive capital gains, so the game was there to be played and I did. Would not touch it much now, wrong current environment, but just recently picked up a few bits of prefs for quick trading in the recent panic(just enough to cover ALL our trading and platforms costs for the last five years, I have just looked it up), but did dive into RUSP (being very familiar with the underlying Co essential role to that economy, hence probably safe from 'tit for tat' political games) at very near par at the height of the Ukraine crisis, IRR in the pink, of course. Likewise most HYPers would not have touched MGHI when it was being offered at sale price on a near 12% (increasing divis to boot) yield, but that is another story which required knowledge of splits....
Having many approaches, if you have the inclination, resources enough to make investment cost effective, and the time does work imho. It makes your returns less volatile, and does have the potential to increase them if properly handled.
Ozyu