February Update

This month the market value of my holdings increased by over £2,000 while the book value changed hardly at all.  You can see the current holdings on the new current holdings page.  This will be updated each month so you can see how things have changed over time.  There was another dividend from trusty Titon which now makes three dividends since I've owned a slice of this little business.  This dividend totalled £178.83 and is currently sitting in my cash balance.  You can see the realised returns from Titon and my other holdings in the new trade history page. 

I've also added a benchmarking page so that you can quickly see the comparison between the returns of a traditional value portfolio against a FTSE 100 ETF.  This month I outperformed the ETF by 3.39%.  Although it's nice to have a positive month it's not really very important.  What is important is the multi-year returns since stock investing is for the long run.

One of my holdings, M J Gleeson, announced a 15p special dividend.  Since I hold over 6000 shares that's over £1,000.  Unsuprisingly the share price has jumped up, although it will probably jump back down again after the ex dividend date.  How this affects my ownership of M J Gleeson depends on how high the price spikes.

Finally, both Richard Beddard and Monevator have mentioned my little blog recently, so I tip my hat in their general direction.  Thanks chaps and good luck.