Clean more than just your household – it’s time to spring clean your investment portfolio too.
Give your portfolio a ‘polish’.
It’s now half way through April. The weather is warming and the nights are lighter. We are firmly on the incline to summer and what better way to prepare yourself for the warmer weather, than ensuring that you do a thorough spring clean.
Seriously, before we get to enjoy the golf course, barbeques with friends or even jet-setting off somewhere hot it’s worth making sure you are starting the summer with a ‘clean slate’.
Get your cleaning gloves on, sponges out and get ready to give your fair share of elbow grease. We all care for and cleanse every aspect of our homes, garage, and clutter in our loft, so why not the one area that is often overlooked by investors? But often the most valuable.
Here at CSS Investments ‘spring-cleaning’ takes on a slightly different definition.
We start with the idea that we should clean-up and organise our investment portfolios first, then we can take care of clearing the garden out! This post intends on explaining why you should run a portfolio review now and how to do so.
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At CSS, we run a thorough breakdown of how a portfolio has performed against the closest matched underlying index, its’ current allocation and we then assess that against our targeted performance and risk level.
“What has performed the best for us this year, since our last review?”
“What has been the weakest area in our portfolios?”
“What are we missing?”
“How protected is my portfolio from risk?”
These basic questions can form the basis to unearth a lot of issues you weren’t aware of in your portfolio. Have those miners been slowly eating away at your performance?
Here’s the problem
I’m not going to pretend that as an investor, you don’t already know about the importance of regular portfolio reviews. A lot of the investor’s that we speak with and have helped in the past, actually do their own portfolio reviews.
The issue, however, is the basis for comparison can become skewed for a lot of investors. It’s an incredibly difficult task to break down your holdings’ entry and exit points, formalise the stock performance to give you a risk breakdown and current allocation in accordance with the underlying index your portfolio is made up of.
The truth is, you don’t know what you don’t know – as obvious as that cliché statement is. You may not know where to start or what is relevant to create a worthwhile portfolio review. But let’s say you do create a review and you have the statistics in front of you that make up how your portfolio has performed.
Then you are struck in the face.
The realisation of poor performance and over-allocation hits you.
“Well the market has been tough this year, that’s why – I don’t need to make any changes, it will pick back up if we just stay put”
Consequently, nothing changes.
Again, we understand that the issue, once you are aware of it, is knowing how you can resolve it. What exactly can be put in place of the underperformance, to rectify any issues?
“…On second thoughts, it’s not worth thinking about. I don’t really need to know, I’ll leave the portfolio review.”
We must stress that we don’t actually assume that you as an individual reading this will actually think those exact thoughts, but you get the idea how it can seem easier to brush the dust under the sofa than actually clean it up.
The best investors are those that understand their financial performance be it good or bad, as those are the ones who can take the steps to improve it.
Here’s how we do our reviews and what we can do for you
The Portfolio Review process is simple:
1. Start with the total portfolio company holdings, both the company name and quantity of stock
2. Run the holdings through our Bloomberg Terminal, aligning the review to exactly a year prior to the current date to get a 1-year performance review (it is assumed stock has been held for a year to give an overview).
3. Align the correct underlying index for a firm basis for comparison then we run the review.
4. We document only the most relevant information in accordance to what the portfolio owner wants to see (eg. yearly performance, allocation, exposure to risk levels etc.)
5. An adviser can then run through everything in the 10+ page document with you on the phone, or in person.
6. There is no obligation to do business with us at this point, but we do offer an advisory service which can be discussed with you, at this stage.
Long story short – a logical solution
The merits of a portfolio review are clear, you know your portfolio inside and out and this is the perfect basis of which to begin the new tax year on the right foot.
It is the time constraint that holds an investor back, combined with frankly not knowing how to run a thorough portfolio that will provide actionable performance data.
…We can help with your review
By offering you a completely free and most importantly, no-obligation, Portfolio Review from CSS Investments, you will get full access to one of the most in-depth breakdowns of your Portfolio you can probably get. For free.
Why offer it for free if it is so good?
We understand why people would ask this question and our response is quite simple, we genuinely believe in educating investors.
Simply understanding your portfolio in greater depth should be something available to all investors, but it seems that some others do want to charge you for this reporting. We don’t.
We do offer a service to help you develop your portfolio, this is something that we would want to discuss with you too. But, this really is a free, no-obligation portfolio review for you to get a firmer understanding of your holdings.
Ok, I am happy with the idea of a Portfolio Review, how can I get started?
Sensible decision! It is simple to get started, just fill out some basic details and you will then be emailed the next steps. All you really need to do is:
- Enter your basic information
- Create a list of your holdings, both the stock name (ticker or spelt out) and quantity of the stock. This can be done either in an excel table document or simply a screen shot of your holdings) Formulated as below:
- BT Group: 550 OR BT: 550
- Royal Bank of Scotland: 1000 OR RBS:1000
- BHP Billiton: 2300 OR BLT: 2300
- Have a quick conversation with one of our team to confirm that you do want this portfolio review. It also gives us the chance to understand what you want to achieve with the review and what your biggest issues with your portfolio are.
But be quick…
The last time we offered this service we received a great deal of interest; we therefore strongly recommend applying earlier to secure your place in the review list as they do run out, very quickly.
Because this service is free, we only offer a limited number of reviews every month, so if you want to get your portfolio reviewed and analysed for April, fill out the information below quickly.
If you do have further questions about the review, you can respond easily to the automatic email you will get upon entering your information below, there will also be a phone contact number available to you:
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Collins Sarri Statham Investments Ltd. (CSSI) is a privately owned traditional stockbroker involved in advising our clients on stock exchange traded investments. Our investment advice is limited to stocks, shares and derivatives based products and where appropriate quoted investment trusts. As our investment advice does not co0ver all retail investment products, under RDR, we classify ourselves as being “restricted”. We only provide advice on stockbroking and associated products.
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