Introduction
Is there room on Stockopedia for yet another regular "my portfolio" blog? Whether or not the appetite exists is probably academic to those of us starting out on a new chapter in our investment journey. The benefits of committing your thoughts to paper and making all your investment decisions open to the scrutiny of the knowledgeable Stockopedia community even potentially without any comments (or indeed readers) makes the additional work required worthwhile.
After a good run in 2017 with high stock ranked shares and momentum, I felt that a change of direction was required to more closely align my investment strategy with my personal goals and  provide some captal protection via a more conservative and structured approach.

Fund Objectives & Characteristics
The Compounder fund has two financial targets: (i) a long term sustainable dividend yield of in excess of 4% and (ii) grow the value of dividends in excess of inflation. The reasoning behind these targets is that this combination meets my objective for a target fund size (or rather target income size) at retirement. In addition, I would like to make a total return in excess of the FTSE All share plus 2%. The FTSE all share plus 2% target is the ‘why bother’ element. In other words if I cant outperform the index then I might as well invest it all in a tracker and go off and play golf/ spend time with the family etc (or maybe for some of you researching shares is a preferred pastime to these alternative activities!).
Given these objectives I would categorise the fund as Quality Income. The intention is not to seek share price appreciation per se (albeit growth of the portfolio’s capital value would be an added benefit) but rather to grow the income stream using the compounding effect of dividend reinvestment until retirement. I have chosen this approach because (i) I have neither the aptitude nor time to research companies for as yet unproven growth potential and (ii) do not wish to rely on the market to be able to realise value via the share price. In other words I believe future dividend streams are much easier to predict than share price movements. I also have the luxury of a reasonable time span. I am not pretending that there is anything new in my approach. It draws unashamedly from other well known proponents of long…

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