Must be a middle class bar.....only one knickers, not knickers and shorts under the mini skirt.

If you no longer have confidence in Croda, why did you only offload 50%?

AyG, I apologise for my late reply in getting back to you,had to sign out and go elsewhere.

I think even you would agree, there is something not quite right, when 3 out of 13 holdings account for over 40% of your holdings.

I am neither a box ticker or chartist, and as had been said on these forums before, I am a great fan of BG and their products.

At this moment in time, the following 3 and their % of my portfolio.

Scottish Mort, 17.0%

Edinburgh, 12.7%

Monks, 13.1%

No apology needed.


I certainly would feel uncomfortable with such a high percentage with one fund manager, even if it is Baillie Gifford. Their house style has worked well in recent years, but there's no guarantee that it will continue to do so indefinitely. And with Baillie Gifford, it really is a single house style applied across all their funds, which is quite unusual.

Anyway, this prompted me to look at my own investments to see where I held more than one fund with the same fund manager. This is what I found (fund manager/percent holding/no. of funds):


That's out of 29 funds I currently hold, of which 4 are in Thailand.  Not sure it means very much, other than that I'm not very concentrated in any single fund manager.

I do it the same way. I dissect all my holdings in a spreadsheet to understand geographic allocation by country and allocation by capitalization and I try to update it at least every few weeks. If you want to be reasonably accurate you have to stay on top of things, I just found that JPM Emerging Markets fund switched out of the third world and now invests 30% in the US! Trustnet, Morningstar and HL all have forensic or x-ray tools to help with this. Once you understand those allocations you can group countries by regions. But the process is a minefield because there is no globally agreed definition of small/med/large cap and everyone has their own ideas about which countries constitute Emerging Markets and developed Asia etc.

Not exactly. I was saying one shouldn't buy funds which are currently popular for a few reasons, including: (1) they are almost certainly popular because of recent performance, and that's not guaranteed to continue, (2) the fund manager may struggle to invest all the additional inflows, leading to a drift of style (e.g. buying fewer small caps), (3) the fund may become unwieldy, making changes to the investments difficult.

Of my six investments in Lindsell Train and Baillie Gifford, two are in Japanese funds, which are relatively small and not popular. (Michael Train has particularly deep experience of Japanese equities.)¹

Two are investment trusts which, having a closed structure, aren't subject to the same problems of capacity as mutual funds².

The final two are Baillie Gifford Global Discovery and Lindsell Train Global Equity. Global Discovery I bought "for fun" - it's higher risk than most of my investments, and with Global Equity, I like quality/growth funds, and I think the fund can grow a fair bit before it hits capacity issues. (The fund managers have said so, too.) I don't think there's a comparable investment trust available, unfortunately. In any case, the two are together a tiny proportion of my investments.


Notes:

(1) Why not investment trusts for Japan? It's because I lack strong conviction in Japan as a market, so I may sell in the next two or three years. This avoids the costs associated with buying and selling investment trusts: stamp duty, bid offer spread.

(2) This isn't strictly true since investment trusts can issue new shares/cancel existing shares after buying them into treasury. However, the trusts have control over the process, so it's far less of an issue - or even no issue at all, according to the trust's policies.