During his 2014 budget speech on March 19th, the Chancellor announced a raft of changes designed to help savers and investors. This included a new increased ISA allowance that came into effect yesterday, 1st July 2014.

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. “

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:
 

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.

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'.

As I’ve mentioned in two 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. “

I’m proud to say that these were the words Lawrence Gosling, Founding Editor of Investment Week used to describe my brother Stephen’s latest hot off the press book, How to Make Money in ISAs and SIPPs.

Each month we like to make sure that the funds we own are acting right. In our opinion, as well as long-term performance being a key factor in fund selection, the short-term performance of a fund is very important once you own it. It’s vital because we’ve noticed that strong funds tend to get stronger and weak funds tend to get weaker.

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