Well thats a wrap for 2023, what a rollercoaster of a year for investing! Thankfully with a nice rally at the end of the year to make us all feel a little better about our performance. The portfolio finished the year with a 14.25% gain, with 4.86% of that coming in December alone. Thank you Santa rally.
I’m reasonably pleased with the performance of the portfolio this year. I use the FTSE All share as a benchmark, which only returned 3.85% for the year, so we absolutely smashed that. Though seeing the returns some people have made, especially those invested mainly in the Big Seven US stocks, has got me wondering what improvements I could have made. Having pondered it for a while I’m not sure I want to change much really. I’m deliberately diversified across the UK & USA, as well as a range of market caps. This will of course limit potential upside, though also protects from extreme draw downs. I’m very interested to see how the portfolio does this year, in what I anticipate will be a more positive environment for stocks, certainly UK small caps anyway.
We’re currently sitting on 17 holdings, with a maximum allowed of 20, so there is room to add a few more. It does look like a lot of the stocks on my watchlist are ready to run, so I may soon have the problem of choosing which ones to buy over others, or having to sell some to make way for new ones. This is a good problem to have though as it means there’s plenty of opportunities out there.
I’ve tweaked my strategy a lot this year, experimenting with a few different timing methods. Now I’ve settled on a strategy I’m fairly confident with. One that combines fundamental analysis with trading techniques for my entries & exits. I’ve writtten a whole blog post on this if you want to know more about it. I think it makes sense to stick with this strategy for the wole of 2024 now. There’s no point in changing all the time without giving a plan the time it needs to prove itself. If at the end of 2024 I think it could do with some tweaks then I may make them for 2025. But for now, the plan is set.
As always I do a deep dive of the portfolio performance and the trades I made in December in the video. Below are some screenshots of the portfolio and performance.
December portfolio performance
Full year portfolio performance
Current portfolio holdings
