The first set

Following my deciding to refresh my opinion on the stocks in my portfolio - I take a rather laissez faire approach to letting my decisions run wild  - I'm starting with the biggest four constituents, solely because they showed up first. A good bit of logic there, I think!

Barratt Developments

I noticed a recent Stockopedia piece on Barratt, along with a number of other listed housebuilders. The piece included a brief recap of the fundamentals behind the sector, which chime pretty well with why I bought them in the first place, and some discussion of the momentum the stocks have picked up. At the moment, that issue of momentum is my main uncertainty around Barratt Developments (LON:BDEV) . I don't think Barratt is a fantastic business - I just definitely liked it at 0.3 PTBV or whatever it was trading at in the lows of last year. That figure now stands at 0.83, a figure which includes a sizable chunk (~£200m) of those interest free loans Barratt was granting to keep sales going. This strikes me as basically deadweight and (at best) unproductive, but doesn't particularly concern me. It's probably getting close to the point I'd want to sell, then, but for that matter of momentum. This question ties me in knots. The momentum effect is known to exist - rising stocks outperform those which have recently fallen - but how applicable is it in practice? The most common piece of advice that's given is that private investors hold losers too long and cut winners short. But the market doesn't know when I bought, and doesn't care - and hence the only logical conclusion to placing a lot of emphasis on that train of thought is that I should start actively looking for momentum investments. I'm not sure I'm comfortable with that.

Verdict: Close to hitting where I want to sell

Howden Joinery

Howden Joinery (LON:HWDN) , on the other hand, I really like as a business. I've said it before, but it bears repeating - they have a great business model, they're upfront with investors in management communications and they have a good deal of growth that should be more or less 'free' - see my very first post on them here. In that…

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