We are fortunate at Stockopedia to have a community of successful investors who have built portfolios worth more than £1m in their ISAs and kindly agreed to share their insights. In this series of articles we will explore their investment strategies and key lessons learned on how to pick stocks and manage risk when building a portfolio. Whether you are an experienced investor or just starting out, we hope that these interviews will provide valuable insights and inspire you to achieve your own investment goals.
Profile
Name: Mark
Job: Retired (formerly corporate banking)
Number of years as a private investor: “Best part of 40 years”
Portfolio Size: Over £1m
Investing Background: Mark started building his portfolio with investment trusts when he was in his early 30s. He continued to build his portfolio throughout his career in corporate banking and became a full time investor when he took early retirement. His portfolio now has about 75 holdings which he monitors daily.
Investing Goals: Enjoy it.
Getting Started
Mark started investing when he was in his early 30s while working in corporate finance in London. “In the early days it was very much safety first,” he says, “as I couldn’t afford to lose any money.”
With the relatively modest sums available, Mark established an investment routine by setting up a direct debit. “I was putting money in every month into big-name Investment Trusts (such as Allianz) as I hoped they would be reliable,” he says.
Before long, Mark started branching out to slightly higher risk investment trusts, such as Pantheon Ventures (a private equity specialist) and a fund which invested in emerging markets. Mark recalls that he would invest £50 a month into each of the trusts in his portfolio and “if I happened to have a lump sum I would put that in too.” Roughly four decades later, he still holds some of those investment trusts but “unfortunately they are not in a wrapper.”
In 1986, the Personal Equity Plans (PEPs) were introduced in the UK which could be used to shelter investments from capital gains tax (much like the ISAs which replaced them in 1999). “When PEPs came along I put them [my shares] into a wrapper,” says Mark. “Eventually I moved to Hargreaves Lansdown, whose platform I liked then and liked now…
