ETF Portfolio Performance for Benchmarking

I have started this writing endeavour with the sole purpose of trying to organise my sometimes chaotic thoughts and hopefully simplify my portfolio and process, so I can spend more time with my family, horses and fishing. I will post here and on my Substack. I hope folks obtain some value from my writing as I hope and think I also will. Writing leads to clarity, simplicity and hopefully challenge ... we are never challenged enough as sole investors. My wife and wider family find the whole process of investing intensely boring. This is one of the most important benefits of Stockopedia for me - the quality of discussion.

I find myself increasingly focussed on areas where I feel I have a competence and interest - Defence & Aerospace, Space, Chemistry, Engineering and Real Assets (Copper, Uranium, silver, platinum and the great debasement trade - gold).

I also manage money for my wider family and whilst I prefer individual shares in my own portfolio, I have made extensive, but not exclusive, use of ETFs and Investment Trusts with family money. It was a shock to me to strip out the ETFs recently and find the annual performance last year of that “sub-portfolio” of ETFs was 62.5%. It makes you wonder if the more important decision is allocation to themes rather than identifying individual shares. I know that will be anathema to some seeking the next multi-bagger, but I will be looking closely at my individual share performance against the sector/theme ETF and acting accordingly. I will share this analysis and commentary here and on my Substack.

In over 40 years of investing, I cannot recall a time when geopolitics had such an impact on global capital flows, supply chains and investing. I believe we can no longer ignore geopolitics in investing and much of my thinking is driven by such considerations. 

The themes I and my family are invested in and which I intend witing about are:

• Defence and Aerospace with a focus on Europe.
• Space.
• Engineering.
• Smart grids / upgrading the grid (no renewables and no geographical preference).
• Nuclear (prefer the commodity itself, and the enabling engineering firms rather than the miners which all look over priced).
• Chemistry (spoiler alert: the UK is utterly un-investable for the chemistry sector).
• Commodities facing a supply squeeze with simple metallurgy and geology that a simple Chemist can understand (Copper, Platinum and Silver).
• Real assets like ports, railways, hospitals, GP surgeries, airports with no geographical preference - These assets can have monopoly characteristics and inflation-linked cash flows.
• The debasement trade which some call the project Zimbabwe trade. Hopefully, to a large extent, real assets will protect your portfolio. However, by debasement trade, I mean gold and gold miners.
• My preferred geographies are the UK, Poland, Korea, Japan and the Nordic countries. The first four are cheap on both a relative and an absolute basis. The Nordic countries are not cheap, but I have found some of the most exciting growth opportunities here. I will focus my writing on Scandinavian stocks which have CREST certificates and are available to UK investors to pop into a SIPP or ISA. There are lots of others writing about US and UK small cap stocks. I am happy to follow them. I hold UK small caps, but will rarely comment as I don't believe I can add additional value.

I will do my best to steer clear of politics, but I know I will fail. I will invite guest writers occasionally onto my Substack who can add more value than I on specific geopolitical or sector issues and opportunities.

I will be open to my investment performance to the extent that I will share the three portfolios I manage, although not the absolute amounts. It would be fair to ask what my performance has been over the past couple of years when my strategy and approach radically changed. My SIPP account is showing a return of 43.3% and my ISA is showing a return of 64.1% (24 months to 9th December, 2025). The family trust is showing a return of 51.3% over the same period. My returns in previous years were more modest.

I also have access to reports from McKinsey, Bain and Co, Deloittes and JP Morgan and have written to them to establish ground rules for sharing here. 

In the meantime, here are the ETFs currently held across all three portfolios, and the performance, calculated by Stockopedia, on an equal weight basis (which is not how they are held, but I will work on a fuller declaration this week):

Note that ARMY was purchased on Friday 11th April 2024 when it first listed, so we do not have a full year’s performance. There are 9 ETFs and I have equal weighted the portfolio at the time of purchase when a number of shares in each ETF as close to £1,000 worth was “purchased”. I intend publishing this every month and benchmarking all other individual shares against the performance of this synthetic portfolio. The grey line is the UK Footsie all share index which was up 13.98% over the same period.