March 2020 marked the 3 year anniversary of me running my Technology Trend Fantasy Fund (which I mirror at about 80% in my real world portfolio). You can view the Fund if you switch to Stockopedia's "old" site layout and then follow the link below:
https://www.stockopedia.com/fantasy-funds/technologytrend-6621/
One of the things that made me a bit nervous when switching to a Tech Only approach is that I wasn't sure how the fund would hold up in a bear market or when a Black Swan event occurred. I thought it was likely it would do ok but the last month has given me the opportunity to see for sure!
Even before the "Covid Crisis" I knew that the fund tends to magnify the effect of a draw down. Tech shared tend to look expensive and be High Flyers and so they get sold off quickly if there is any market dip. Then you hear people saying things like "well people aren't going to stop using facebook because of Covid" and then the tech shares tend to recover in just as fast and over exaggerated way on the upside.
You can see market panic in a portfolio of Tech shares.
As Covid started to become something that looked like it might move the market significantly I sold about 10% of the portfolio, trimming things that weren't working out, anything that I was nervous about and removing some hardware focused shares in favour of Software focused shared. In hindsight I probably should have sold more so that I had more ammo for the recovery but once the drop in the market started it was much more savage than I had thought it might be and then I had normal investor fear that I was selling at the bottom.
Its worth saying that in my real world portfolio my approach was not exactly the same. I sold about 25% of that and also hedged a bit by buying a physical gold ETF and some plays like Tristel (LON:TSTL) and Begbies Traynor (LON:BEG) . These are not tech shares of course, so I broke my own rules but I wanted to see if my instinct was better than following the loose "rules" of the…
Popped back to the old site to have a look at the holdings.
One aspect that struck me was little or no exposure to Biotechs. That would not have been a drag on performance over the last three years. But more recently Biotechs have started to outperform and very recently have broken out to new highs collectively.
From UK trading accounts there are collective vehicles such as the SBIO.L ETF, or the IBT.L or BIOG.L Investment Trusts. Dropping down to individual stocks you could add COVID-19 anti-viral and vaccine contenders???
