Padders72 wrote:I sensed your rebuke in the post and above and respected the point enough to keep silent but I am now under water with this after holding for 6 months. At what point am I allowed to be unimpressed?
Terry Smith repeatedly makes the point that a year is an arbitrary and rather short period to assess performance over.
I buy active funds because I want the "slant" or characteristic that fund has - I wouldn't for example buy Fundsmith if I was interested in small cap value investing.
You presumably bought Blue Whale because you wanted something with a "tech" slant combined with emphasis on growth?
If you're unhappy that investing approaches can move from being a good to a bad fit for the market as a whole's behaviour, or that economic expectations can change (the concern about rising inflation leading to interest rate rise concerns leading to loss in perceived value in growth tech stocks), then you may spend less time unimpressed (and indeed save a bunch of time) by sticking to something like VWRP?
If you're going to invest in actively managed funds (especially ones that aren't closet index trackers), then it is inevitable that you'll see periods of over and under performance compared to the index.
If you invest for any significant length of time, you'll most probably see periods longer than 6 months over which you're down on an investment. I believe there's something in the small print to that effect.