December’s monthly performance across all my listed investments was -0.57%. Ending the year with a YTD of 7.75%.
Top 5 company holdings: $MEGP, $CAML, $INPP, $RIO, $BATS. The REITS income fund has ended the month down 1.66%. GOLD and SILVER ETC holdings were down 0.62%. Fund of funds up 0.79%.
A terrible December in terms of stock market performance, there was no Santa Rally this year on either side of the Atlantic which was very disappointing (hopefully Santa comes next year). However based on my accounting of running from the 6th of the month I did eek out a small improvement after the terrible December which means my annual performance was 7.75% which was ok.
Its not double digits (thats the aim for this year) and of course you could (quite rightly) argue that had the money been in a S&P tracker fund I would be up well over 20%.
It’s also worth noting that most of my performance this year has come from the REITS and Commodities and not my individual stock picks, however I did have some good wins this year including…
Yellow Cake +20%
Tritax Euro Box +20%
Redrow +22%
TP ICAP +12%
… my biggest losses were on…
Barrick Gold -7%
IG Group -6.5%
NextEnerySolar -23%
Team17 -20%
MONY Group -10.5%.
… fortunately due to my trading rules all my losses were considerably less than my wins in terms of total amount invested.
I’m fairly confident going into the new year in terms of investment however not so confident in terms of the UK economy because it feels like you’re starting to see the results of recent government polices…
Surrey has no school places for over 13’s due to the spite tax on private schools (adding vat onto fees).
Companies are making redundancies. I know several personally who have been affected by this. The negativity from the government leading up to the budget and the attack on businesses with rises in national insurance has caused this.
Shops, pubs and restaurants are closing down, again because of increased employment costs with NI and the minimum wage going up (it’s gone up 60% over the last six years).
Rents are the highest they have ever been and people are struggling to find anywhere to rent. This is due to the continual attacks on landlords. I suspect rent controls are the next idiotic idea we will see.
Companies are moving their listings to other countries and the UK stock market is slowly dying as companies choose to list in other countries. Many reasons for this including the fact that our markets are taxed more highly than anywhere else with 0.5% stamp duty on all trades whereas USA is 0% and has more liquidity.
Bank of England now expects 0% GDP growth in 2024 Q4, down from 0.3% that was previously forecast.
More than half of people in the UK receive more in benefits than they contribute in taxes (according to the ONS). No great surprise but it just isn’t sustainable is it?
Inflation is on the way back up and the economy is stalling which means stagflation.
Sadly for the Liebour government you cannot tax, spend and regulate your way to economic growth so I hope they will also be noticing everything that’s going on and they will read up on the laffer curve and change tack.
So with all that in mind I will be trying to focus on companies that have little UK exposure, they can be listed in the UK but ideally most of their sales and employment will be outside the UK thus saving me this pain.
As an investor and stock market trader the only way to deal with the madness is to try and profit from it which is exactly what I will continue to focus my efforts on.
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