Every now and then someone sends me their portfolio for thoughts and suggestions.

One particularly stuck in my mind because it’s the type of portfolio I could have had if events had turned out differently.

Reviewing it made me feel like I’d been transported to an alternate timeline.

One of those parallel universes where the US and UK had fallen to fascism. Everybody wears military uniforms and clipped moustaches, including the women.

The letter ‘K’ has replaced the letter ‘C’ to prove we no longer live in the free world. Y, know – people get their burgers from MkDonalds, and their propaganda updates from Fakebook. (And there’s one fewer episode of Sesame Street.)

I’m not saying this portfolio was overweight authoritarian states (unless you count contemporary Britain, right kids?)

But this is the place I might have wound up in if I hadn’t found the passive investing freedom fighters early on.

Where – instead of the Bogleheads – I’d fallen under the sway of nefarious choice architects such as newspapers and stock brokers – all broadcasting their wealth-lists like martial marching music across every channel.

Time for a debrief.

What a state

The portfolio under interrogation comprises 25 actively managed funds. 

Now to be fair, some of these funds handed out a beating worthy of a brownshirt to anything I own.

Beneath those headline victories, though, all is not well.

Alarm bells ring for me when I see a long tail of micro portfolio allocations as in the screenshot below.

Dwindling portfolio weights undermine the overall contribution each holding can make, and imply a chaotic strategic approach. 

Do not adjust your set! The holding names have been redacted for privacy reasons. The red box shows the majority of holdings make up less than 5% of the portfolio’s weight, while 44% of holdings weigh under 1%.1  

Remember those winning active funds I mentioned? Alas these stars made only a minor overall contribution, because they were typically held in very small amounts. 

This doesn’t say much for the forecasting skill of whoever picked most of these funds. Spray a target with enough bullets and you’ll get some hits. 

The offset, I suppose, is that the dogs also only inflicted flesh wounds. 

The majority made a marginal difference to overall returns – for better or worse – so what was the point of them?

What’s the strategy here?  

Big bother

Overall, the portfolio has done well. It’s netted double-digit nominal returns for a decade.

So what am I complaining about?

Well, the snag is this active assortment was comfortably beaten by a world tracker index fund. A simple choice that would have saved money and bother.

(Specific holdings again redacted. It adds to the crypto-fascist theme of today’s post, wouldn’t you agree, citizen?)

I’ve ranked the portfolio’s funds by performance (best to worst) and noted the OCF, too.

We can see that only seven out of the 25 active funds beat the simple MSCI World ETF I used as a benchmark (the green row in the table).

I knew the funds 10-year annualised return in most cases, but where I only had the 5-year return I’ve shaded the cells grey. I’ve rounded the returns and Ongoing Fund Charge (OCF) to the nearest quarter point, except the portfolio’s average OCF. 

A crude projection of this portfolio back ten years sees it lag the MSCI World ETF by a few percentage points annually. It trails by about half that against Vanguard LifeStrategy 100.

I don’t know the trading history of the portfolio – and not all the funds were available 10 years ago – so my estimate is not the realised return. It’s useful only to see whether these active managers together would have added any value versus a passive investing strategy.

Also, I should state this portfolio is over 90% equities. Most of the remaining allocation is in high-yield fixed income.

I’m not saying this portfolio was fated to trail a standard issue index tracker.

What’s the complexity adding?

My question is what is this investor getting for all the cost and risk of holding this motley crew?

It’s not adding diversification compared to a global tracker, that’s for sure.

The portfolio is tilted 60% towards Blighty. It would have made mincemeat of my comparison ETF if UK plc had trounced the US this past decade.

Alas, the opposite happened.

Moreover it’s not blind chance this portfolio under-performed.

Global capital simply wasn’t lining up to back Britain ten years ago. The world market told us that an 8% holding in UK equity was about right back then.

The sub-text read: “Don’t overdo it.”

Today UK stocks weigh in at around 4% of the global benchmarks.

So why is this portfolio stuffed to the gills with British-focused funds?

Perhaps because UK broadsheets and brokers are primarily incentivised by what sells. And that’s typically recent winners and the reassuringly familiar.

Such a pitch – ten years ago – got you a portfolio that banked too much on the UK, and funds vulnerable to a mean-reversion smackdown.

To emphasise the redundancy here, Morningstar’s Instant X-Ray tool found the portfolio’s top ten (underlying) share holdings present in anywhere from four to seven of the portfolio’s constituent funds. 

Feeling all the fees

You may also have noticed that even the cheapest active fund in the mix costs more than three times the fee charged by the ETF.

The most expensive fund charges you more than 11 times the tracker’s fee! Yet it delivered less than half the annualised return over the decade.

For simplicity, imagine this portfolio’s weighted total OCF was 1% (instead of the 1.2% it actually sums to).

Let’s also generously assume returns were the same between the active funds and a global tracker (rather than the case study lagging, like it did in reality).

If the portfolio’s gross annual return was 10% for each of the next 10 years, its 1% charge would consume 10% of the profits.

The index tracker’s 0.15% fees would only eat 1.5% of the profits.

This cost differential makes all the difference when compounded over the years.

Price does not equal quality

Still, those skilled active managers will justify their fees eventually, right?

Well, 18 out of the 25 failed to match a simple tracker, over a meaningful time period, despite their proprietary trading strategies, PhD-bedecked support teams, and glossy brochures.

Worse, the performance ranking above sees the most expensive funds clustered in the bottom half of the table.

Granted, my case study is a random snapshot.

Better evidence comes from the long-running, regularly updated SPIVA analysis that confirms the best performers are not the ones that charge you the highest fees. 

Back in the real world

If all this is true then there’d be an outcry, wouldn’t there? The hard-charging active fund industry would be found out, surely?

Yep, just like ageing women stopped buying expensive anti-wrinkle products years ago.

The evidence has favoured passive investing for even longer than Monevator has been blogging – coming up to 15 years for us – and yet the gravy train rolls on.

At least fit your own oxygen mask first. If your portfolio exhibits traits similar to this case study then I’d urge you to benchmark it against a global tracker using Morningstar’s Portfolio Management and Instant X-Ray tools.

And if that sounds like we’re on some kind of deal for Morningstar endorsement, know we’re not, sadly. I just genuinely think you can learn a lot from using those tools. (A similar analysis of my own portfolio prompted my recent investing mistakes post.)

I don’t pretend passive investing is perfect. Maybe you’ll own some over-bloated winners. Perhaps it encourages hands-off capitalism. Indices stuffed with sin stocks. Pick your poison.

Indeed just like democracy, passive investing is probably the worst strategy – except for all the others you could try instead.

(With grateful thanks to Winston Churchill.)

Take it steady,

The Accumulator

1. Some shares and even an ADR add to the fund fun, if you’re wondering why there are more than 26 holdings. [↩]

This article on the importance of your savings rate is by Budgets and Beverages from Team Monevator. Check back every Monday for more fresh perspectives from the Team.

I have a new hero in life. His name is Tony Stark.

You might know him as Iron Man.

Tony Stark is a superhero and plays a key role in The Avengers. He’s witty, confident, driven, ambitious, and at the top of his game.

What’s not to like?

Sure, I know he’s not real. And that I’m about ten years late to The Avengers.

But I’m currently going through a marathon of watching the huge Marvel catalogue of films. This after revealing to my partner I’d never seen one of them during lockdown last year.

(Apparently that’s quite the sin.)

And while I can’t be Tony Stark, I can aim to emulate him – sort of.

Spoiler alert! This article won’t include images of me in tight, bright, superhero pants. Nobody needs to see that.

Rather, with my first year of investing ended, I want to tell you about my own superpower: the savings rate.

It ain’t new

So the idea of zeroing in on your savings rate isn’t novel.

In fact, it’s one of the pillars of financial independence.

But used well, your savings rate is arguably the best financial superpower you could ever have.

In one of his many brilliant articles, Mr Money Moustache describes the savings rate as follows:

… simply the percentage of your take home pay that you’re not spending.

Straightforward, right?

Yes, straightforward, but most people still treat savings as an afterthought. Whatever is left over at the end of the month is shoved into some low-interest, easy access savings account.

Earning nothing – yet so many of us do it believing it’s a good thing!

Few of us save enough, either. There are always demands on our money.

Before Covid, the average UK savings rate was between 7.5 and 8.5%. Measly.

Yet it has been estimated that in lockdown at the end of 2020 UK households had an average of 19.9% available to save from their gross disposable income. That’s much higher than before the Covid pandemic, thanks to less temptation – and ability – to spend money.

It was proof that a higher savings rate was achievable for many people.

Not easy. But possible.

One rule to rule them all

But why do all these numbers matter? Well, the higher your savings rate, the sooner you can reach financial independence.

“It’s not that simple!” I hear you cry.

It really is.

As Mr Money Moustache’s famous article The shockingly simply math behind early retirement stated:

It turns out that when it boils right down to it, your time to reach retirement depends on only one factor:

Your savings rate as a percentage of your take-home pay.

It’s that powerful.

Target locked

So what’s a good savings rate percentage to aim for?

10%? 15%? 25%?

Try 50%.

If you can get to a position where you can save half your pay packet, then you can retire in 17 years. Save even more and achieving financial independence gets ever closer.

You could start at 21 and be done before you’re 40.

For many Monevator readers, that’s exciting. But still, so many of us struggle to pay ourselves first.

The savings rate in the UK fluctuates a lot. Methodologies vary as to how to measure it. Some studies have found that the average household savings rate for the UK has been as low as 2% at times.

At that pace it would take 61 years to retire!

No wonder so many of the population seem set to work into their 70s.

How then do you reach your target?

Well, as The Accumulator says:

Hitting your target comes down to how much you can save and the returns you earn on your investments.

The second part of that statement can really accelerate your journey.

Because, while saving 50% of your pay is amazing, putting your savings back into money-making assets catapults you to a new level.

Compounding the rate

As soon as you start saving and investing money, it starts earning money itself.

Those earnings then start earning, too.

That’s the beauty of compound interest. (If I really were a superhero, I’d want compound interest to be my trusty sidekick.)

Time for an example.

Let’s say Gary saves 50% of his pay every month, without fail. That equals an annual saving of £30,000.

Gary could put that into an easy access cash savings account, which right now would earn 0.1% on average in the UK:

After a year, Gary would have made £13.75 extra.

At the end of five years, he would have saved £150,000, with £382 interest on top.

At the end of ten years, he would have saved £300,000, with compounding interest giving him an extra £1,518 on top.

Yikes. Nobody is likely to achieve financial independence ever – let alone early – this way.

Gary could instead put his savings into low-cost global index funds. These have historically earned a real return of around 7% a year.

And at 7% the maths is very different:

At the end of the year, Gary would have made £1,162 extra.

After five years, he would have saved £150,000, with £30,026 on top.

At the end of ten years, Gary would have saved £300,000, with compounding giving him an extra £135,236.

“I am Iron Man”, says Gary with pride.

Even Hawkeye can get in on the action

Sadly, a 7% annual return from the stock market isn’t guaranteed. But there are enough studies and examples to trust that history is on your side if your time horizon is long enough.

The power of the savings rate isn’t discriminatory, either.

If someone earns £200,000/year and their friend earns £50,000/year, but both have a savings rate of 50%, then they will be able to retire around the same time and at the same (relative) standard of living.

There really is no excuse not to get started.

How do I work out my savings rate?

The savings rate maths is easy.

Both Mr Money Moustache and The Accumulator have explained how to calculate it on an annual basis.

Says Mr Money Mustache:

(Take home pay – spending) / (take home pay) x 100 = savings rate %

Or, more wordily, from The Accumulator:

• Take your annual net income
• Subtract your annual expenses
• Add all your other income streams including rentals and bank interest
• Add pension contributions and employer matches if pensions are a factor in your plan. Gross them up to account for tax relief.
• Don’t add investment income and gains. These are accounted for in your return assumptions.

However I’m too much of a control freak geek to wait a whole year to work out my savings rate…

Monthly magic

So I calculate my savings rate monthly and update that figure each month.

I direct a big chunk of my payslip towards the following destinations:

• 10% to cash savings (I’m forever paranoid about my emergency fund)
• £333.33 into a LISA (to ensure I max it out at £4,000 over the year)
• The rest into low-cost index funds in a Vanguard ISA

I first aimed to put away a challenging 50% of my income. But I was fortunate enough to discover I could save even more.

I upped my target to 55%, and then to 60%. As the year came to a close, I found I had an average savings rate of 61%.

And although I’m self-employed, one of my clients pays into a pension for me. This means my effective savings rate is actually even higher!

Track your savings rate

For me, tracking my savings rate has been key. By following my numbers monthly I can see if my percentage goes up or down.

If it’s down, I’m furious with myself.

If it goes up, I want to challenge myself to up it again.

Yeah, I’m rather competitive.

But then again, so is Tony Stark!

But you don’t have to go so big. Find out what is right for you.

Start with 10% or 20%. That’s still so much better than doing nothing – and at the top end far better than average.

If you can save 20% rather than 10% of your income, you could take up to 14 years off your future retirement date.

Now that’s what I call a superpower.

Happy saving!

What caught my eye this week.

Sooner or later in any survival drama, half the survivors walk out on the other half in search of a better future.

Sure, they’re all safer together in the camp.

But that also sucks – what with the dull food and the claustrophobia and the love triangles and the sudden deadly nocturnal bloodbaths.

Let’s take a chance, urge the ringleaders. No more meekly accepting fate. It’s time to take back control!

Viewers wince and shout “don’t do it!”

But it’s to no avail.

Stuck in the mid-series doldrums, the screenwriters need these renegades to be chowed down by zombies or vapourised by aliens or to turn on each other, starving and half-mad.

An antihero gets his comeuppance. A fan favourite cops it, too.

Whoever is left limps home, desperate to perpetuate their lucrative Netflix gig for six more seasons – unlike their unfortunate eviscerated comrades who can now only dream of 20 years signing T-shirts at Comic Con.

Lost in the supermarket

Back in the real world and in a Britain today that definitely shares nothing in common with the above scenario, things seem to be mildly unraveling:

• One in six adults reports being unable to buy essential items because they were not available, according to the ONS.

• The army has been delivering fuel to ease a multi-week crisis.

• Inflation has hit a decade high.

• 76% of British businesses believe staffing is a threat to UK competitiveness, says the CBI.

• There’s not enough people around willing to slaughter the pigs.

• British fisherman now need 38 pieces of paper to export fish into the EU, versus four before we left the EU – just one example of the vast frictions introduced at our borders.

• Covid still stalks the land even as it recedes in places as disparate as the US and Italy. This despite 138,000 deaths, multi-month lockdowns, and an early lead in vaccinations.

The list goes monotonously on.

I’ll say it again – this is definitely not all happening because of Brexit.

From book shortages in the US to soaring gas prices in Europe, the Containergeddon that’s broken supply chains, and a global shortfall in everything from semiconductors to paint, Humanity PLC is struggling to reboot.

However Britain is especially vulnerable to this disruption – even absent a Brexit – because we’re very exposed to trade.

And what was heroically spun by some as a reason to make such activity difficult with our by-far largest trading partner has now come back to bite us.

As a result our economy – ‘running on fumes’ says Bloomberg – has been slow to bounce back:

Complete control

In response, the charismatic blonde survivor who headed our breakaway group has continued his finger-pointing.

Despite nearly every economist in the world warning we’d face consequences from staff shortages if we turned off free movement with Brexit, PM Boris Johnson blames business, this time for perpetuating a low-wage culture.

As the Brexit-tracking professor Chris Grey notes on this shift:

Johnson, inevitably, is the master of this illogic, managing to suggest within the course of one interview that the crisis doesn’t exist, and that it exists but is nothing to do with Brexit, and that it exists but is part of what delivering Brexit means.

It’s like the three-card Monte scam in reverse: rather than the gullible punter never turning up the winning card, Johnson’s trick is to present whatever card he picks as being the winner.

There was of course no evidence that immigration made more than a tiny difference to the employment prospects of Britons. That was a fiction, like so much other campaign nonsense:

What free movement did do was keep the lorries rolling, the elderly cared for, the Starbucks coffees coming, and the home renovations happening.

What we’re seeing on the High Streets is just the tip of the iceberg:

Remember, most of the economic cost of Brexit won’t be visible in the streets or on the supermarket shelves… A missing programmer. A car component that’s late or dearer. A fintech that’s founded in Berlin instead of London. A permanent drag on growth.

— Monevator (@Monevator) October 4, 2021

Even if you believe anything that Brexit will lead to upskilling and a pay boost for Brits, it’s clearly going to take decades.

So you might think the government should come clean and start taking appropriately massive action to redress this problem, given we have now got (slightly) more freedom to act and it can still borrow cheaply.

However besides the blame game and the cheering of fuel shortages, the main talk at this week’s Tory party conference was of tax rises and cutting spending.

It sounded ominously like Austerity 2.0.

Clampdown

Chancellor Rishi Sunak is no idiot, so you might wonder – beyond idealogy – why he’d go down this path at a time of record low borrowing costs.

Why not build new towns to solve Britain’s housing crisis? Why not plant 100,000 hectares of new forests instead of 30,000, to make a dent in our climate pledges?

If this isn’t the time for borrowing to boost the economy then when?

I suspect there are couple of big impediments.

Firstly, as former Bank of England governor Mark Carney warned Britain is reliant on the “kindess of strangers” – the capital inflows that finance our current account deficit.

On top of that Britain’s finances are uniquely emeshed with the world:

Source: Bank of England

For example, a third of UK corporate borrowing is financed from overseas lenders.

The international perception of the UK’s finances is therefore a priority for any competent UK chanceller. As bad headlines multiply, Sunak can’t risk a credibility gap, a run on the pound, and/or rising borrowing costs.

As Merryn Somerset-Webb puts it in the FT [search result]:

A 2013 study from the World Bank suggests that once government debt goes over 77 per cent of GDP every additional percentage point reduces real annual GDP growth by 0.017 percentage points.

At [the UK’s] 106 per cent that adds up — its effect on living standards might be why Sunak said at his party’s conference this week that he considers the ongoing piling up of debt to be “immoral”. All this suggests more taxation.

Whatever the Brexit rhetoric, we’re not totally in control here. Sunak has to at least talk tough – and arguably act tough – to keep foreign capital on-side.

That’s surely one reason why the government is mooting tax hikes, even with GDP in the hole and the cost of borrowing for investment neglible.

Train in vain

The second reasonable reason the government may be reluctant to embark on the kind of massive infrastructure spending spree I’d like to see at a time of record affordability is that it simply can’t be done.

It’s hardly treasonous to say we had a problem building more homes (a massive shortfall for decades) or infrastructure (Crossrail is years late) even before the pandemic and Brexit.

Now we’re short of workers, who exactly will build the new towns? The new infrastructure?

I still believe my ginormous tree-planting idea has legs. If anything requires low skills it’s digging a hole, it’d boost the economy, and it needs to be done.

But this sort of thing won’t level-up the workforce long-term.

Perhaps Sunak’s wonks have run the numbers and told him that without workers he can’t productively spend the money, even if he wants to?

London calling

I’m often reminded by critics that Monevator is an investing site – as if the nation’s economy was as inconsequential for us as the football results.

But fair enough, what could this mean for our finances and portfolios?

Firstly, Britain is not finished. Those who were opposed to our leaving the EU are foolish in predicting a collapse.

As I’ve said since day one, Brexit is more like a leaky tyre from a puncture than a headlong crash into the barriers. The pandemic added bumps in the road, but we’re still a strong, well-educated economy.

The UK will do worse economically indefinitely because we left the EU – something you might legitimately feel that was worth it for other reasons. But we won’t become an economic basket case.

Rather, I believe we face mild stagflationary forces – although not enduring stagflation, and I’m not (yet) predicting a recession.

Inflation will rise for a time, because it is rising everywhere. It may then persist for years here because of the higher cost of workers. The Bank of England’s new chief economist recently said as much. His underlings predict CPI inflation will hit 4% later this year.

But faced with low economic growth, the Bank will surely be reluctant to raise borrowing costs too fast.

This may be where Sunak’s steathy tax rises will instead step-in to remove some money from the economy to curb inflation – hopefully in a vaguely progressive fashion.

Tax rises can be expected to hurt economic growth at the margin, but may be judged better than the alternative (an international confidence scare).

The takeaways are probably something like:

• A stronger pound than you might have expected.

• Similarly stronger (low-yielding) UK government bonds.

• Cash in savings accounts continuing to deliver negative real returns.

• Mortgage rates stay low and house prices don’t crash.

• Self-constrained against outright tax rises, we can probably expect a capital gains tax hike and lower reliefs from pension contributions.

• I expect (and welcome) a minimum wage hike, given the rhetoric. (Of course previous governments did this without needing Brexit to do it.)

• UK markets may be largely held back by weaker growth at home and a strong currency making our exports less attractive or profitable abroad.

The usual caveats apply. This is just my best guess, for what it’s worth. It’s definitely subject to revision with new data.

Things may go better than expected. For example, the removal of furlough hasn’t yet done the damage some predicted.

I do hope we get a few more breaks. We’re overdue them.

Have a great weekend!

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