Dod101 wrote:There is nothing to say that the HYP candidates need to be UK oriented ...
Well, I'm not certain exactly what you mean by "UK oriented", but there is this board's guidance, which says "For the HYP Practical board we define an HYP as a portfolio comprised exclusively of ordinary shares. If selected, such shares should have a dividend yield above the average for the FTSE100 index and be drawn from the constituents of the FTSE 350 index.". The FTSE 350 index's constituents are required to be shares listed on the London Stock Exchange, which is a UK-resident stockmarket. So at least in that sense of "UK oriented", you're factually wrong: there is something that says HYP candidates need to be "UK oriented"
Dod101 wrote:... or if there is that is a silly rule which needs to be removed.
For what it's worth, I agree that it's rather silly as a general rule about how HYPs should be run. For individual HYPers, though, a "UK only" rule can make sense as a personal rule: it reduces the task of running the HYP in practice in various ways - as some examples (probably not all that there are), personal taxation tends to be simpler if one doesn't have to take foreign taxation systems into account; watching out for company results tends to be simpler if one only has to watch UK regulatory news (*); and company-report-writing requirements and conventions differ between countries, so there's more learning to be done about how to find one's way around an annual report if one has to deal with reports written for shares listed in different countries.
HYPers will differ quite a bit about how important they regard those admin simplifications as being - e.g. on taxation, at one extreme having US shares in their HYP won't make any significant practical difference to someone whose non-HYP investments include US shares anyway, while at the other extreme having foreign shares in their HYP can make the difference between having to submit tax returns and not having to do so. Inbetween, there are positions such as having to submit tax returns anyway, but the tax returns having to give more detail if one has foreign income. And HYPers' opinions about how the returns from their HYPs might be affected by allowing foreign shares as well as UK shares - in theory, allowing more shares to be selected can only increase the possible risk-adjusted returns or leave them unchanged, not decrease them, but in practice there is the question of how much they're increased by and the risk that information overload from the larger selection causes the HYPer to fall further short of the theoretically best portfolio choices than they would have done otherwise. The net result is that both the costs and the perceived benefits of allowing foreign shares in one's HYP will vary greatly between HYPers, so whether an individual HYPer's cost-benefit analysis comes out in favour of or against allowing them is a personal decision that no-one else can make for them - no matter how obvious that someone else considers the decision to be!
For me personally, that analysis led me to conclude that I want a "UK only" rule for my HYP, and so I have one (**). I am however under no illusions that it is a personal rule and there will be plenty of HYPers who make the opposite decision for equally valid personal reasons. So it isn't IMHO very suitable as a general rule for this board from the point of view of trying to be as inclusive of HYPers as reasonably possible. And since I doubt that allowing foreign shares to be discussed would lead to this board being swamped with such discussions (***), I think it is reasonably possible in principle to remove it, or to be precise remove its "UK only" aspect (it does have other aspects as well, most obviously that it rules smallcaps out). So I would be in favour of removing the rule and replacing it with one without the "UK only" aspect - but it's a would-be-nice-if change for me, not something that needs to be done.
Last but not least, I've no idea whether the opinion you state that such rules need to be removed is an exact statement of how you feel, pure hyperbole or something inbetween, but some advice to anyone who really does feel that such a change needs to be made: you'll get nowhere by expressing such opinions here. Such a change can only happen if the site's owners/admins and moderators decide it's a good idea, and if it does happen it will change the scope of this board. That means that what they've said in viewtopic.php?f=21&t=13514 applies, especially "for the avoidance of doubt, no scope discussion is permitted on HYP-Practical. That may only be discussed on the Biscuit Bar". So you need to post such suggestions to the Biscuit Bar, not here, and you'll need to think about their concerns, e.g. about ease of moderation.
(*) Which in practice generally means only RNS - there are other UK regulatory news services companies are allowed to use instead, but very few HYP companies do.
(**) The rule I use usually agrees with this board's "FTSE 350 only" rule, but is not the same as it, and it does differ on the occasional share. It's basically "must be traded on the London Stock Exchange and must not involve me in foreign taxation". The most obvious case where it differs is Royal Dutch Shell's RDSA shares, which are in the FTSE 350 and traded on the London Stock Exchange, but their dividends are subject to Dutch taxation.
(***) I base that doubt on the facts that the TMF HYP Practical guidance did not contain a "UK only" rule and that while foreign shares were discussed on it from time to time, they didn't IMHO ever even come close to swamping it.
Gengulphus
