I just realised I never posted my H1 2018 portfolio review even though I had written it, so I’ll combine…
I bought shares in Gattaca (GTAC:LN) over a year ago but never did a proper write-up on the company. The shares have been one of the worst performers in my portfolio, and after the company issued a profit warning earlier this month, the shares were predictably hammered. I was down 43% on the position so it was time to do a proper analysis of the company and see if my thesis has changed.
This is an update of my portfolio. I’ve sold a couple of positions in my portfolio in the last week, PTL and SFT.
Another 6 months have flown by and it’s time to report on my portfolio’s performance again. At the end of the first half of 2017 I was in the midst of investing in a large pot of Japanese small stocks and haven’t made many changes to the portfolio since. I had 26% cash but this quickly reduced to 13%, so I was almost fully invested for this half.
The portfolio returned 10.4% in H2 2017, outperforming the FTSE All share tracker which returned 4.4%, and the S&P tracker which returned 9.8%. That brings my cumulative performance since inception in 2013 to 313%, or 26% annualised.
I keep thinking these years of good performance need to end at some point as the stock market cools off but the end isn’t in sight yet. I generally think my portfolio is somewhat uncorrelated to the wider market, given that most of my money is concentrated in relatively few UK small caps, and 25% is now in a basket of Japanese small caps.
I’m a little late in getting around to posting this, but here’s my usual half year summary. I started 2017 with 41% in cash, so expected my performance to lag the rest of the market unless I put that cash to good use or unless the market went down. As it happened, the market was up and my expectation was correct. My portfolio returned 6.7% while the FTSE All share tracker returned 8.2% and S&P tracker 8.9%, all including dividends. I’m fairly satisfied with that, and even more satisfied that by the end of June I had put a lot of that cash to good use. My cash position is now 11% and my current portfolio is below.
Northern Bear is a small company in the UK providing “specialist building services”. Segments include Roofing activities, which provides a range of roofing services, including slating, tiling for domestic, commercial and public sector properties; Materials handling activities, which includes supply, service and maintenance of fork lift trucks and warehouse equipment, and Building services activities, which provides things like fire protection and asbestos removal.
It has a market cap of £9.5m and trades on London’s AIM with a trailing P/E ratio of 5.9. My initial thought was that it was in some kind of trouble, or had warned on profits, but that isn’t the case. It simply seems to be a case of the market overlooking a small cap to me.
I have made a number of purchases in my portfolio over the last couple of months and haven’t gotten around to writing them up properly. Here I’ll briefly detail what I’ve bought and will have posts to follow with a bit more detail on some of the stocks.
In the second half of 2016, I spent very little time on my portfolio. It’s one of the benefits of having a value strategy buying good companies, that you can mostly forget about them. At the start of the half, I was 49% in cash, so I expected to underperform the market by quite a margin. I was pleasantly surprised that my portfolio was up 13.9% in the half, versus 15.1% for the FTSE all share tracker and 8.3% for the S&P tracker.
An update on a sold position $SAGCV as well as some additional thoughts on one of my holdings, $ESH:SP. A full portfolio update and 2016 performance report will be following in the next week or two.
H1 2016 has been a strong half for my portfolio, it returned +31.7% vs the FTSE All-share tracker return of…