What caught my eye this week.

I began drafting today’s post on Wednesday, observing that while 2024 had begun with a splutter for most markets after the almighty Santa Rally, Bitcoin was still going strong.

How come?

Just like the others, Bitcoin has benefited from the emerging consensus that central banks will begin to cut interest rates this year. Perhaps markedly so.

Any asset that pays no income will surely benefit when the competition from cash recedes.

But there’s been at least three other narratives driving the Bitcoin rally:

• A widely-held conviction that the SEC in the US is about to approve at least one Bitcoin ETF
• The upcoming ‘halving event’ in April, which will halve the rate of release of new Bitcoins to miners
• The fact that the latest cypto winter didn’t kill Bitcoin, despite all those bankruptcies and felonies. This must have made it stronger

It all helped Bitcoin’s price advance around 150% in 2023 – albeit after an epic crash the year before.

Things that go bump in the price

Yet no sooner had I hit ‘Save’ on my draft than this happened:

Yes, the Bitcoin price fell more than 10% in about ten minutes.

So much for the asset class growing up!

As I write, the cause of Bitcoin’s latest moment of madness appeared to be the opinion of a sole analyst.

Marcus Thielen of crypto platform Matrixport was quoted by The Block as saying:

“SEC Chair Gensler is not embracing crypto in the U.S., and it might even be a very long shot to expect that he would vote to approve bitcoin spot ETFs.

“This might be fulfilled by Q2 2024, but we expect the SEC to reject all proposals in January.”

Now, I can’t imagine why the SEC might be leery of green-lighting a retail-friendly ETF for an asset that dives 10% on the opinion of a single analyst in about the time it takes to Google it.

It’s not the message so much as the market that’s the problem here.

Everyone’s not a winner

Bitcoin remains a thinly-traded and illiquid asset.

A relatively small number of so-called ‘whales’ own a huge proportion – around 40% – of the outstanding stock. (Or at least all the stock that’s available that hasn’t been lost to Welsh landfill and the like.)

Indeed it’s not clear to me what diehard HODL-ers like Michael Saylor of MicroStrategy see as the endgame for their remorseless Bitcoin accumulation.

I obviously understand that scarcity can push up the price of a desired commodity.

But when that commodity’s only proven use case so far is as a (hugely volatile) store of value, surely that’s undermined if only a hundred or so entities control so much of the supply?

How will all the other stuff Saylor talks about with Bitcoin happen if it gets so closely-held that it becomes very hard to actually buy – and potentially use – it?

I suppose that the new financial order they predict (note: I don’t) could run with only tiny or even notional bits of Bitcoin changing hands. Maybe these massive holders will then act as de facto central banks?

Maybe, but I don’t remember reading about that in Satoshi’s white paper.

A stake in one future

Still, I continue to believe that brave – or crypto-enamoured – private investors can justify holding up to a few percent in Bitcoin or Bitcoin proxies such as MicroStrategy or the Bitcoin miner Riot Platforms.

For what it’s worth I do – despite some ongoing befuddlement.

Bitcoin and blockchain are among the most intriguing innovations of our time. But one has to acknowledge the vast range of potential outcomes, from Bitcoin going to zero, right up to it backing fiat currencies or being the preferred currency of powerful AI agents in a William Gibson-esque dystopia.

Hence why I’ve argued a small allocation that’s left to boom or bust is a practical response.

The trend is your friend

Of course this strategic inactivity might be severely tested if Bitcoin actually ten-bagged in a year.

And we can well imagine that a Bitcoin ETF could be very bullish for the Bitcoin price. It would make it easier for individuals and institutions to buy a small stake of the diminishing pool of free-floating Bitcoins.

As I believe a higher Bitcoin price is a self-fulfilling prophecy when it comes to the future price of Bitcoin, so higher prices should gradually de-risk the asset class by itself.  At least for a time.

But others think differently, of course.

Some even say ETF approval would be the death knell for Bitcoin, because it would curb those exotic use cases.

Others just ridicule what they see as an unusually hard-to-kill tulip-mania.

We’ll have to wait and see.

Incidentally my comments here relate only to Bitcoin. I have no conviction about the other cryptocurrencies.

It is not that I’m certain they will all fail. If Bitcoin endures and delivers anything like a decent return, then I’d bet in that particular world that a few of the other thousands of cryptos will do very well, too.

It’s more that in any outcome where any other particular crypto currency succeeds, I think Bitcoin will be at least okay – as digital gold, if nothing else – even if it’s not the standout performer.

In contrast, in all eventualities it seems obvious that the majority of Bitcoin’s thousands of rivals will amount to nothing, even if a dozen or so do thrive. There’s just so many out there.

Hence Bitcoin seems the median risk bet.

Putting 1-5% into a cryptocurrency is plenty enough risk already. So I’ll do whatever I can to reduce the uncertainty!

Have a great weekend.

[continue reading…]

One of the most frequent questions I get on Twitter/X is: “Which investment platform do you use?”

I don’t really know why people ask this in a world where the excellent Monevator comparison table exists.

^{Disclosure: Links to platforms may be affiliate links, where we may earn a small commission. It doesn’t affect the price you pay nor how we judge the brokers.}

However there are a few real-world issues that are out-of-scope for the table’s aggregated roundup.

So today I’m going to treat you to a tour of every investment platform (or ‘broker’) that I use and why.  

Disclaimer: I will be stating my opinion based on experience. I do acknowledge though that I may have made mistakes, been misled, or that I could be confused about things. I’m happy to be corrected in the comments. None of this article is a recommendation to use (or a recommendation not to use) any particular investment platform. Brokers are also welcome to DM me for clarification. Especially if it means they’ll sort out some of the things I’m complaining about. 

Behind the scenes at the Finumus family office

First off, why do we use more than one platform?

There are a couple of reasons:

• No one platform does everything we want
• We don’t want all our eggs in one basket:
  • Yes, I know, there’s the FSCS. But it’s capped at an only moderately useful £85,000
  • Yeah, I know, assets are held in segregated client accounts1 Well, sorry – I used to work in this industry and I don’t trust it

I’ll only be discussing platforms that I have direct experience of using on a fairly frequent basis. These are:

• Hargreaves Lansdown
• AJ Bell
• Interactive Investor
• IWeb (essentially the same as Halifax Share Dealing)
• IG
• X-O (part of Jarvis)
• Interactive Brokers

Yes, that’s quite a lot of platforms. There used to be even more! Platforms we’ve previously used but that we no longer do include:

• iDealing
• Barclays
• Charles Stanley

I’ll let the reader draw their own conclusions from my change of heart.

Finally, when I say “we” I mean the Finumus ‘micro family office’. This is a portfolio of ISAs, SIPPs, and so on that I nominally manage holistically across three generations of our family, along with our Family Investment Company (‘FIC’).

Family linkage

Our micro family office set-up raises the first feature we like to see – some sort of ‘family linkage’ capability.

Both Hargreaves Lansdown and AJ Bell make a reasonable go at this. Account holders can nominate another account holder to manage the investments in their account. The managing account can then log in as themselves and flip to the other person’s account – without needing to share credentials – and without access to payment capabilities.

This is very useful to me for looking after the accounts of parents and children in a secure way.  

Good as it is though, the family linkage is slightly hobbled. A prime example is that you can’t take any of the so-called Appropriateness Tests for things like complex products by proxy. Which is particularly annoying when you’re trying to rebalance into something that the investment platform has arbitrarily decided is ‘complex’.

You’re left having to phone Grandma to talk her through the test. If she’s on a six-week cruise at the time you can forget about it. 

However, even when hobbled, these options are much preferable to those investment platforms that don’t offer this facility at all – which is every other one on my list.

Whatever the platforms’ reasoning for the lack of any family linkage, in the real world it leaves you having to insecurely share credentials – which is far from ideal – and in some cases having to call family members for a 2FA code every time you want to login.  

Investment platform costs

We are less bothered about annual platform costs than we are that they should not scale with our AUM2.

So we like fixed or capped costs.

All our accounts are already over the value where the cap is kicking in. For example, Hargreaves Lansdown charges 0.45%, capped at £45 p.a.3 while AJ Bell charges 0.25% capped at £42 p.a.4 (as long as you don’t hold funds). That’s just £45 and £42 respectively fixed, as far as we’re concerned.

All told, our annual platform costs range from £0 (XO, IWeb) to a couple of hundred pounds (at Interactive Investor – but that’s for an ISA and SIPP) per platform, per person.

I don’t have anything else to add on this subject beyond what you’ll find over at the Monevator comparison table.

Does your investment platform charge extra for funds?

Perhaps because the regulator banned kick-backs from the fund managers to the platforms, some of the latter seem to have decided it’s okay to replace the revenue by charging customers higher fees for funds.

Here’s HL, for example:

Source: Hargreaves Lansdown

Right… Owning £2m of an ETF costs me £45 a year, but owning £2m of the same fund in an OEIC (Open-Ended Investment Company) costs me £4,000 a year.

What extra work is Hargreaves Lansdown doing to earn that £4,000? Absolutely nothing as far as I can tell – as evidenced by the fact that platforms like IWeb and Interactive Investor charge zero to hold that same fund.  

Source: Dilbert

Because we don’t really believe in active management and there are equivalent-cost ETFs for nearly everything we want, we only own one OEIC type fund.

And – duh – obviously we hold it across the investment platforms that don’t charge extra for it.  

Note that none of the above applies to ETFs. Even though they have ‘fund’ in the name, ETFs are treated as stocks on platforms that charge high fees for funds.

Dealing costs

We don’t trade particularly frequently, so we’re not very sensitive to dealing costs.

That said, Hargreaves Lansdown charging £12 a deal doesn’t feel very 2024 to be honest.

The £5 that IWeb charges seems more reasonable. It’s notable too that AJ Bell is reducing its dealing fees from £10 to £5 in April 2024.

Again, see the Monevator comparison table to stay across all this.

Foreign exchange (FX) fees

If you’re not careful, FX fees can really cost you.

Here’s IWeb on the subject: 

Source: IWeb

The example on IWeb’s website features a notably sub-sized £1,000 trade. Perhaps because 1.5% on a more sensible £5,000 – £75 versus £15 – would seem like quite a lot?

A shame, because IWeb is such good value on every other vector.

To illustrate how much of a problem high FX fees can be, let’s switch £100,000 worth of Microsoft stock into Apple. A trade which – given the liquidity of US markets – you’d expect to cost a few basis points.

Here’s the deal:

Generously, the platform doesn’t charge commission. So the switch will cost me a mere £2,977 – or 298 bps of the notional.

Maybe let’s not bother doing the trade after all, eh? 

Costly foreign adventures

There are two problems with high costs for foreign exchange.

One is when the FX fees are high, obviously.

The other is when you have to settle everything into GBP5. Our example switch above saw two rounds of FX pain, because we can only hold GBP cash in the account.

Now, in the case of ISAs, this is not the platforms’s fault. It’s what the ISA rules mandate.

But still, a platform doesn’t have to charge an FX spread you could drive a bus through.

In contrast, here’s the FX fee over at Interactive Brokers: 

Source: Interactive Brokers

Interactive Brokers is a full 50 times cheaper than IWeb when it comes to FX fees.

Let’s math out that same switch in an Interactive Brokers ISA:

The trade costs us £63 (6.3 bps). Quite a lot less than £2,977. 

Naturally, it’s still not good enough for me though. What I really want to do is keep the proceeds in the base currency of the instrument traded, usually USD6. That way I don’t need to pay any FX fees when I switch between assets in the same currency. Why should I? 

Outside of an ISA you can do exactly this with several platforms. But a grand total of two brokers in my list enable you to do this in a SIPP: Interactive Investor and Interactive Brokers.

Here are the current cash balances in my Interactive Investor SIPP:

See all those lovely hard currencies?

It’s something of a happy coincidence, because US stocks are best held in a SIPP. So this way you do not have to pay any dividend withholding tax on your US dividends, at least not with sensible platforms.

(In theory the withholding tax exemption should also apply to Canadian stocks. In practice it doesn’t.)  

Both Hargreaves Lansdown and AJ Bell are big behemoths. They have the wherewithal to support multiple currency balances and settle trades in the instrument’s underlying currency within their SIPPs.

Yet they choose not to. I can’t imagine why? 

Source: Hargreaves Lansdown

And for completeness:

Source: AJ Bell

Whose money is it anyway?

One way to avoid sneaky FX fees is to only buy ETFs for overseas exposure, and to always buy the GBP share class.

This way, your FX exchange happens inside the ETF wrapper at a much better rate / lower spread.

Since the underlying currency of most ETFs is naturally not Sterling, you should buy the Accumulation units to further reduce FX friction. Otherwise your dividends will be paid out in USD, which will then be FX-d into GBP at the platform’s spread and so bleed out another few bps of cost. 

For instance, let’s say we wanted to track the MSCI World. We could buy the iShares Core MSCI World UCITS ETF USD (Acc) – whose base currency is USD – and specifically the GBP share class to avoid egregious FX fees: 

Source: JustETF

Beware: a cunning trick sometimes deployed by platforms is to act like the GBP share class doesn’t exist.

You look up the ETF in its interface, you’ll only find the USD share class.

And when you complain, it’ll give you some blather about liquidity, or tell you that it “can only carry one share class of each ETF” – presumably because some numpty decided to use ISIN as the Primary Key in the investment platform’s product database.

Cock-up or conspiracy, limiting choice like this leaves you paying the platform’s FX fees. 

Investment platform says “no”

Which instruments each platform allows you to trade and under what circumstances is both highly variable between platforms, inconsistent across time, and hard to predict in advance.

Something you bought yesterday, for example, might not be available to buy today. Likewise, something that was previously not deemed ‘complex’ now is. This changeability can make rebalancing very messy. 

Let’s say you own some Blackstone Loan Financing (Ticker: BGLP.L) in your IWeb ISA, and you want to buy some more with the spare cash in there.

Bad luck:

Source: IWeb

Now what do you do? Well, you could sell a different stock in another ISA on another platform and buy back that same stock on IWeb. This way you free up cash in the other ISA to buy more BGLP with – but at the cost of you paying two lots of transaction costs and slippage en-route.

In theory you could transfer the cash from IWeb to the other platform, while sending the other stock across to IWeb (perhaps if you were worried about overall platform exposure). But in practice this takes weeks and can cost money so it is not really an option.

Rule changes can also leave you in a weird situation where you own this stock, but if you sell it, you won’t be allowed to buy it again – creating a random hysteresis function in your rebalancing decisions. 

Low no-go

Arbitrary restrictions abound in the weeds on the investment platforms.

Another common one is to simply not support the lowest cost ETFs in a category. 

Want to increase your Japan weighting a little? A fairly normal process would be to go to JustETF, filter by ‘Japan’, sort by TER, and then buy the cheapest one:  

Trackers gonna track, so the ETF we want is clearly the cheapest 5bps one from Amundi. Yet most brokers don’t carry it, and if I ask them to add it they won’t.

Hence I end up paying nearly twice as much (9bps) for the Xtrackers’ one. 

Call me old-fashioned, but at the very least anyone who holds themselves out as any sort of stockbroker ought to offer dealing in any London listed security, at a bare minimum. 

Another difficult area is leveraged ETFs, which many platforms just won’t go near.

And all this is before we even get to the shit show that are the regulations around Packaged Retail and Insurance-based Investment Products (PRIIPs):

Source: AJ Bell

The KIIDs are not alright

In short, PRIIPs is an EU rule that says you can’t buy US-listed ETFs.

We might have left the EU but – completely unsurprisingly – the one single EU rule that was a personal inconvenience to me has not been repealed, and hence most UK investors still can’t buy US listed ETFs.

This is a shame, because for US markets, US-listed ETFs are cheaper, better, more innovative, and (if held in a SIPP) highly tax-efficient.

In theory, if you are a high-net worth or professional investor you can opt out of PRIIPs and then be allowed to buy US-listed ETFs. This is your ‘MiFID status’ in the parlance.

In practice, the only broker that actually enables this is Interactive Brokers. (IG says it does but, in my experience anyway, it doesn’t work, in that it still won’t let you buy US-listed ETFs, at least not in an ISA). 

Because the PRIIPs rules require the platform to have a KIIDs on file for every fund you want to buy this can even hobble buying London-listed stuff, if the broker doesn’t have its systems properly sorted.

There’s also some uncertainty as to what counts as a ‘fund’.

AJ Bell and Interactive Investors enable you to buy completely different sets of US-listed Business Development Corporations (BDCS) because they’ve each made completely different decisions about which ones are funds under PRIIPs.

Which seems a bit… random.

Margin lending

Our Family Investment Company’s account is held at Interactive Brokers. The major advantage of which is very competitive margin lending rates:

Source: Interactive Brokers

Since interest is tax-deductible for a FIC, we concentrate most of our leverage there. 

The other brokers don’t support leveraged trading, aside from some white-labeled CFD offering perhaps.

IG obviously has CFD / spread betting. But given its high financing spreads, that’s not really an offering that appeals to me.

Flexible ISA

Why don’t more platforms offer flexible ISAs? IG is the only one (on my list) that does.

As a result I end up carrying higher balances with IG than I would otherwise like to, from a platform risk perspective. 

Pet peeve #1: Interactive Investor

It’s a small thing, but a special groan for Interactive Investor for not being able to take SIPP platform charges directly from your SIPP, but rather making you pay them separately from your bank account.

Doing so likely increases your effective post-tax platform cost by between 25-67%, because you’re paying fees from outside the SIPP with post-tax money, rather than from inside with pre-tax money.

I’ve complained to the platform several times. Maybe some of you could complain too? It would cost Interactive Investor nothing and it would save us all a few quid from the tax man. 

Pet peeve #2: Interactive Brokers

I have a bit of a soft spot for Interactive Brokers. It is great value and I have a SIPP, ISA, General Investment account and the FIC account over there.

The platform stands out for offering MIFID professional status, low FX fees, multi-currency accounts, and being able to trade Options (long-only in the SIPP) and futures (in a general trading account). 

However, it is not all sweetness and light.

To start with, Interactive Brokers’ interface is something only a grizzled institutional equities trader from the 1990s could love. Your Nan won’t be using it to buy a few hundred shares of M&S. The learning curve is steep.

The other thing to note – for people who trade UK stocks – is that Interactive Brokers doesn’t have any Retail Service Providers (RSPs).

RSPs are the institutional traders who get you those ‘inside the spread’ and ‘price improvement’ prices that you see with other platforms.

Interactive Brokers basically only offers Direct Market Access (DMA). If you trade UK stocks, particularly mid caps, this may be a problem for you. 

My overall view of the investment platforms

Source: Finumus ‘Vibes’, based on personal experience.

Right, let us know what you think in the comments below. And do check out the fine print in the Monevator broker comparison table for more on each platform.

If you enjoyed this, you can follow Finumus on Twitter or read his other articles for Monevator.

1. AKA ‘Seg’. [↩]
2. Assets Under Management. [↩]
3. Cap is £45 for an ISA, £0 for a trading account, £200 for a SIPP. [↩]
4. £120 fee cap for a SIPP. [↩]
5. UK pounds. [↩]
6. US dollars. [↩]

Anybody else feeling more hopeful? Or noticing that – despite self-reporting as a rational human being – their portfolio affects their mood like the wind spins a weathervane?

Last quarter’s surge saw our Slow & Steady model portfolio roar back nearly 7% since our last check-in.

We ended up 9% for the year, all told. The reverses of the last two years have almost been undone (ignoring inflation) and suddenly the January blues don’t seem so bad.

Here’s the numbers in HappyDays-o-vision:

The Slow & Steady portfolio is Monevator’s model passive investing portfolio. It was set up at the start of 2011 with £3,000. An extra £1,264 is invested every quarter into a diversified set of index funds, tilted towards equities. You can read the origin story and find all the previous passive portfolio posts in the Monevator vaults.

Check out in particular the 10% quarterly jump in UK government bonds – hitherto the portfolio villain for the past two years.

That other wealth-filching dog of late, global property, has also made amends with a near-13% rise.

Mind over doesn’t matter

The post-2021 downturn has proven once again that investing is a game played almost entirely in the mind.

It’s been a relatively mild slump. (So far, anyway…)

Yet it’s felt like an awful slog.

Perhaps the (retrospectively) easy wins of 2009-2021 skewed expectations?

Or maybe it’s because the spectacular bond fail of 2022-2023 undid the comforting but simplistic notion that government bonds are ‘safe’?

Or perhaps portfolios aren’t so much ego extensions for many of us but rather fortresses. Built to provide a measure of protection against the slings and arrows of an uncertain world.

It’s scary when your defences crumble.

And almost nothing passive investors held for the last two years worked except commodities – an asset class that had been written-off as a disaster area for more than a decade.

Get rid

When something hurts you, the natural response is to push it as far away as possible.

Buying an asset when it’s on sale is much harder than it sounds. Just consider the number of comments we received last year asking “why should I bother with bonds?”

It’s interesting then to read Vanguard’s upbeat take on battered bonds in its market outlook for 2024:

Despite the potential for near-term volatility, we believe this rise in interest rates is the single best economic and financial development in 20 years for long-term investors.

Our bond return expectations have increased substantially. We now expect UK bonds to return a nominal annualised 4.4%–5.4% over the next decade, compared with the 0.8%–1.8% annualised returns we expected before the rate-hiking cycle began…

If reinvested, the income component of bond returns at this level of rates will eventually more than offset the capital losses experienced over the last two years. By the end of the decade, bond portfolio values are expected to be higher than if rates had not increased in the first place.

Vanguard’s soothsayers believe the near-zero interest rate world has passed into history. A combination of rising government debt and aging demographics will force interest rates to settle onto a permanently higher plane.

We’ll see.

Safety in numbers

For anyone still feeling burned by the bond crash, we’ve previously made the case that buying high and selling low is as bad with bonds as it is for equities.

It’s true too that higher-yielding bonds should eventually self-heal the damage that rate rises inflicted on bond portfolios’ capital values.

Meanwhile, filling the confidence-vacuum created by imploding bonds, we’ve seen trading platforms heavily-promoting safety-first money market funds.

Cash has rarely looked more regal and I dare say that many investors now hold it as their main defensive asset class.

But the following long-term chart shows the potential opportunity cost of that approach:

Cash – as represented by the money market ETF with the longest track record I can find (green column) – failed to deliver even half the cumulative return of an intermediate bond tracker over the past 18 years.

American humble pie

The unrelenting dominance of US equities is the other key takeaway for anyone investing with 20/20 hindsight.

Who needs diversification when you can invest in an S&P 500 tracker and rule the world? Our tilts to UK equities, property, emerging markets, and small caps have all cost us dear.

So why look beyond America?

Well, here’s another forecast. This time we’re showing the 10-year real expected returns estimated by renowned fund shop Research Affiliates:

Research Affiliates places emerging markets, UK equities, and global property well ahead of the global market (All Country) when it comes to likely future returns.

And US large cap equities (not shown) are expected to deliver just a 2% annualised return.

Commodities diversification looks worthwhile if the mooted 3.4% average return is near the mark. As does persevering with index-linked bonds (‘UK ILBs’ in the chart).

Cash (in the shape of UK T-Bills, the pink column) is the only asset class forecast to post negative (nominal) returns while the cyan columns shows Research Affiliate’s nominal bond outlook.

Naturally none of this futurology tells us what will happen for sure. Research Affiliates has been predicting that emerging markets will eclipse US large caps for years, for example.

But it’s a useful reminder that banking everything on the S&P 500 is merely recency bias masquerading as an investment strategy.

Annual rebalancing time

Okay, there’s just time for some light annual portfolio maintenance.

We previously committed to an asset allocation shift of 2% per year from conventional gilts to index-linked bonds until we are 50-50 split between them.

That means this quarter:

• The Vanguard UK Government Bond index fund decreases to a 25% target allocation
• The Royal London Short Duration Global Index Linked (GBP hedged) fund increases to a 15% target allocation

Note though that our overall allocation to equities and bonds remains static at 60/40.

We also annually rebalance our positions back to their preset asset allocations at this point in every year.

After 2023, that mostly means selling off a few per cent of our Developed World ex-UK fund, and putting the proceeds into index-linked bonds.

Inflation adjustments

Next we increase our contribution by RPI every year to maintain our purchasing power.

This year’s inflation figure is 5.3%, so we’ll invest £1,264 per quarter in 2024.

That’s an increase from just £750 back in 2011. Inflation adds up.

New transactions

Our stake is split between seven funds according to our predetermined asset allocation. The trades play out as follows:

UK equity

Vanguard FTSE UK All-Share Index Trust – OCF 0.06%

Fund identifier: GB00B3X7QG63

New purchase: £114.99

Buy 0.455 units @ £252.71

Target allocation: 5%

Developed world ex-UK equities

Vanguard FTSE Developed World ex-UK Equity Index Fund – OCF 0.14%

Fund identifier: GB00B59G4Q73

Rebalancing sale: £1572.32

Sell 2.667 units @ £589.50

Target allocation: 37%

Global small cap equities

Vanguard Global Small-Cap Index Fund – OCF 0.29%

Fund identifier: IE00B3X1NT05

New purchase: £60.22

Buy 0.148 units @ £407.35

Target allocation: 5%

Emerging market equities

iShares Emerging Markets Equity Index Fund D – OCF 0.21%

Fund identifier: GB00B84DY642

New purchase: £510.22

Buy 279.665 units @ £1.82

Target allocation: 8%

Global property

iShares Environment & Low Carbon Tilt Real Estate Index Fund – OCF 0.17%

Fund identifier: GB00B5BFJG71

New purchase: £229.13

Buy 98.94 units @ £2.32

Target allocation: 5%

UK gilts

Vanguard UK Government Bond Index – OCF 0.12%

Fund identifier: IE00B1S75374

Rebalancing sale: £162.77

Sell 1.189 units @ £136.89

Target allocation: 25%

Global inflation-linked bonds

Royal London Short Duration Global Index-Linked Fund – OCF 0.27%

Fund identifier: GB00BD050F05

New purchase: £2084.55

Buy 1970.271 units @ £1.06

Dividends reinvested: £201.46 (Buy another 190.42 units)

Target allocation: 15%

New investment contribution = £1,264

Trading cost = £0

Take a look at our broker comparison table for your best investment account options. InvestEngine is currently cheapest if you’re happy to invest only in ETFs. Or learn more about choosing the cheapest stocks and shares ISA for your circumstances.

Average portfolio OCF = 0.16%

If this all seems too complicated check out our best multi-asset fund picks. These include all-in-one diversified portfolios, such as the Vanguard LifeStrategy funds.

Interested in tracking your own portfolio or using the Slow & Steady investment tracking spreadsheet? Our piece on portfolio tracking shows you how.

Finally, learn more about why we think most people are better off choosing passive vs active investing.

Take it steady,

The Accumulator