Morning all,

There is a strong supply of updates, so I hope you'll help me with a few suggestions in terms of what to cover today!

Yesterday featured great results from Creightons (LON:CRL), which is now 6% of my portfolio. I am tempted to add more of it, but 6% feels heavy enough for this micro-cap.

I am increasingly bullish on the UK market, seeing as it remains so weak. It's down another 1% today, and Stockopedia's median forecast P/E ratio for UK stocks (one of my favourite macro indicators) is just 12x. That number tells me there must be plenty of value opportunities, and I've been trying to find fresh candidates for the portfolio.

In addition to Rightmove (LON:RMV) (added earlier this month), I've also added B.P. Marsh & Partners (LON:BPM), the insurance investment vehicle, to my portfolio. I'd like to be more active in the insurance space - there are plenty of interesting and overlooked candidates in the sector. For example, the FTSE 250 component Lancashire Holdings (LON:LRE) is completely ignored by most investors.

Anyway, given my view on equities, I'm nudging up my portfolio allocation and becoming more and more "risk-on". My portfolio is now 82% equities, 14% bonds and 4% cash.

For the Howard Marks fans in the audience, I'd recommend this YouTube video published last week by his company.

It's a 25-minute interview outlining his overall views on macro topics. He is quite cautious about the 10-year US "recovery", thinking that we must be closer to the end of the good times than the beginning. But he also acknowledges that US equities have been growing into their expensive valuations over the past year (the stock market hasn't budged while earnings have been growing very fast).

Other points from the interview:

  • Private assets have more attractive pricing than public assets. All publicly-traded assets are expensive.
  • The crypto boom is mostly based on people hoping to find greater fools to sell their coins to (but I would note that hardcore crypto advocates don't fall into this trap).
  • ETFs may provide the illusion of liquidity where the underlying holdings are illiquid, e.g. junk bond ETFs. He asks the question: if junk bonds are illiquid,…

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