Back to normal this month, with next to nothing going on this month other than volcanoes and general elections campaigns.  If you're interested, please check out the Current Holdings, Trade History and Benchmark pages for the most recent updates.

Current Holdings

Electronic Data Processing Plc (LON:EDP) made me happy by paying out a small dividend after I'd sold them, bringing the annualised returns for that company to 20% during my brief period of ownership. 

The cash that I had left at the end of March went into Victoria (LON:VCP) , an existing holding.  I increased this holding because I didn't really want to add another new holding - I like to hold around 10 companies - and it was the cheapest by price to book of those companies where I didn't already have more than 10% of the portfolio invested.  On the downside I don't really rate Victoria's chances of being a big gainer as it hasn't traded much above its current price in the past - i.e. there is technical resistance - and it hasn't traded at book value for years and years, which doesn't bode well for my mean reversion theory.  However, who am I to say what the future holds?  Given that I think most analysts are as good at seeing the future as house bricks I ignored my own fears and upped the holding.

Benchmark

The benchmark figures this month are less ego boosting than last month, but at least they are not depressing.  Once I get some 6 month and 1 year figures I think I'll drop the 1 and 3 month comparisons from the table as I think 1 and 3 month benchmarking is for the short term traders.  Eventually I'll probably just do 1, 3 and 5 year comparisons to the FTSE 100, with 5 years being the important one.

FTSE 100 : 3.7% over my newly adjusted Fair Value

After my idiotic attempts to assign a 'fair value' to the FTSE 100 last month, the far more scrupulous blogger over at Retirement Investing Today pointed out that my assumption that the long run average CAPE is 16.4 (taken straight from Shiller's S&P data) is a bit too simplistic.  It is a fact that the UK markets typically have a lower PE than the US.  …

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