See all the previous Monthly Recaps here.
Mar & Apr Performance +2.5% vs FTSE All-Share benchmark +0.7%
YTD Performance +3.1% vs FTSE All-Share benchmark -0.54%
(Part Time) Fund Manager’s Report
The eagle eyed amongst you would have noticed that I skipped March’s report. I apologise for that; my intention was always to publish a monthly report, but a combination of work, family matters, and travel meant I was too busy.
The performance over the two months was like Jekyll and Hyde; March saw a small loss, but April saw a stonking performance that means my overall portfolio is now a respectable +2.5% up over the two months, compared to only +0.7% for the FTSE All-Share. It also means that YTD, a third of the way into the year, I have outperformed the benchmark by 3.6 percentage points.
Pleasingly, it looks like it was a broad outperformance in both my ISA and SIPP in April, rather than any one particular company that has driven the returns. I like this type of performance; it validates my overall strategy, rather than relying on a few lucky winners to rescue the day.
It was a quiet two months for transactions. 1 Buy, 3 Sells, but a surprising 5 ex-div events. I will go into detail on the buys and sells in a section below. But in terms of dividends, I had a total of 1.2% of my portfolio value come in, driven mostly by the huge bumper final and special dividend from Rio Tinto.
So far my Rio Tinto (LON:RIO) shares, held for just over a year now, has disappointed in terms of capital appreciation. I bought at around 5300p and my analysis consistently shows that it should be able to achieve 8000p at some point. Yet it has languished, never going above 6400p. But the dividends have compensated; I have received a total of 10%+ in a year, so I can’t really complain. It does go to show that dividends can really make a difference to investment performance, especially when capital gains are hard to come by. This was despite a bad operational year for the company; COVID related production drops in Australia, cancellation of their Lithium project in Serbia, and continued troubles with their Mongolia copper expansion. However, the first and the latter are now solved, so I expect a good operational year in 2022, and…
