How behavioural finance can help improve investment returns

Posted by Stephen Sutherland on Wed, Jun 25, 2014 @ 01:30 PM

As I’ve mentioned in three previous blog posts, I’m proud to say that David Mountain, an ISACO client and engineer was one of the many people that loved my new book, How to Make Money in ISAs and SIPPs. In his review, David said:

“I guess the part of the book I most enjoyed was ‘Chapter 9: Beyond Greed and Fear’ – I found myself saying ‘that’s me’ and I can fully recognise this behavioural finance, which is a very interesting subject. I would rate the book with 5 stars. “

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Tags: How to Make Money in ISAs and SIPPs, Investment strategy, Behavioural Investing

The latest changes in our portfolio

Posted by Stephen Sutherland on Wed, Jun 18, 2014 @ 01:30 PM

On the weekend of Sat 7th June/Sunday 8th June we made some changes to our portfolio. As you will see below, Fund A and Fund C had recently been underperforming. This prompted us to take some profits from Fund A (switch 50% of the fund into cash) and exit completely out of Fund C. We also found a couple of potential buying opportunities that excited us. These are Fund E and Fund F. We made a 13% allocation of our total portfolio in each of these two new funds. This left us with approximately 27% in cash. After the switch was complete and the trade is settled, our new portfolio looked something similar to this:
 

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Tags: Investment strategy, Investment news

Is the market behaving as it should?

Posted by Stephen Sutherland on Wed, Jun 11, 2014 @ 01:30 PM

In this post we'll take a look at what has been happening in the market since early May.

This information is taken from The Big Picture, to download a sample copy please just click here.

The way we use to check if the market is behaving as it should is to look at the trading action (price and volume activity) of institutional investors. Why do we do this? The stock market is about six month forward looking and its daily activity is the consensus conclusion whether institutional investors like or don’t like what they see happening down the road. By watching what the big players are doing (buying or selling) each and every day, it can provide essential clues to which way the market is likely to head.

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Tags: Investment outlook, Investment strategy

The 7 most common mistakes investors make: Mistake number 1

Posted by Stephen Sutherland on Wed, Jun 04, 2014 @ 01:30 PM

In this new series of posts we're going to look at 7 of the most common mistakes that investors make. In this post, we'll start by looking at maistake number 1, 'Making 'low fees' the highest priority'.

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Tags: Investment strategy, Investment mistakes, Investment charges