ITs and Stocks in a HYP?

[MDW1954]

We ourselves run, since PEPs (now ISAs) one HY portfolio each, mine has similarities to HYP, in that I mostly invest in individual Cos, but uses a much wider range of cap values, my wife specialises in ITs, although she does have the odd fund in there. Plenty of years to form an opinion, since we started to invest more seriously in the early 70s anyway, having messed around with penny stocks before.

Ozyu

It's been clear to me for a while that you are one of LF's more experienced investors. While I was investing in the early 70s, I was still a student at university, so would struggle to attach the word "seriously" to my efforts.

I'm anxious to avoid thread drift (especially so, since as a moderator, I'm supposed to stamp it out!), but I'd welcome a brief explanation as to why you migrated away from penny stocks, exactly when ITs and HYP came into the picture, and how asset allocation features.

If this board doesn't feel right as the venue for a reply, then there are others. But I'm sure I'm not alone in looking forward to any reply.

MDW1954

[Gengulphus]

I have taken a look at enough HY portfolios, real ones from all kind of investors, and on various boards to form an opinion on the matter, and I do say imho. In any case I was not aware that these boards exclude one's opinion and need your approval, since opinions that is all they can contain, and my opinion is every bit as valid as yours my boy, of that I am absolutely certain. ...
...
IMHO, which I am entitled to hold and express as I read the thread.

I didn't say or imply that you needed my approval - I simply asked you about the basis for your opinion. You're entitled to your opinion and to express it on these boards, but if you do express it, I and everyone else here are equally entitled to ask questions about it, and indeed to question its validity and to express contrary opinions of our own - expressing and questioning opinions is the essence of discussion. What I don't think you're entitled to do here is try to patronise me by addressing me as "my boy".

One of the relevant pieces of info is the comparison of GDHYP vs plain old CTY, ...

FWIW, I agree that GDHYP hasn't done all that well - OK, but nothing better. But note that it's not actually a portfolio picked by any one person - instead, it's been picked by a voting consensus of quite a lot of people. That was a deliberate decision on my part in 2008 (when I started it), among other reasons to make it as free as possible from a suspicion that had been expressed about HYP1, namely that pyad is an unusually good stockpicker and its success was due to that rather than to its strategy. One of GDHYP's lessons may well be that such consensuses are not a particularly good method of stockpicking, and that if so, it may well have paid quite a high price to be free of that suspicion.

But I don't accept a comparison with an IT that's been chosen now as especially valid, however "plain" or "old" it is: an investment has to do quite exceptionally well to stand up well in comparisons chosen with hindsight. The reason why I agree that GDHYP hasn't done all that well is instead that it does seem to me to have made quite a high proportion of poor choices - certainly quite a bit higher than I've made in my own HYP, though I certainly haven't avoided all of them.

Gengulphus