A quick hello

Well I am still alive and investing!

Having a baby has rather impacted my morning routine hence the recent lack of posts. Hopefully I will be getting my early mornings back sometime soon!

Anyway what is the current status of my portfolio?

I am still fully invested and even have some bank shares showing a profit!

In an investment book I read it said that if you can get through a bear market without selling your shares on the way down then maybe you have the right aptitude to be a stock picker rather than just invest in the index.

So I passed that test but can I pick the right stocks?

Sometimes but I have been taught a painful lesson about diversification in the last couple of years. Being overweight banks in the summer of 2007 was not very clever but in my defense I did not buy any Northern Rock even when it looked really cheap. Secondly no one saw the banking crash coming - not the Bank Of England and certainly not the directors of the banks. So what hope did I have? Hence the need for diversification.

The good news is that one of the banks I held was Barclays which is now at 50% of its pre-crash price and could conceivably return to 2007 levels in the next 5 years. The even better news is that I bought more Barclays early this year and those purchases are now showing a gain of 160%!

The bad news is that I bought into Halifax before the crash. Those shares are showing a 95% loss and will stay in my portfolio as a lesson that even blue-chips can get things spectactularly wrong.

Regarding other companies, I am keen to buy into Oracle but as I decided that now is the wrong time to buy defensive shares (which is how I think of Oracle) I put the money into Barclays to catch some of the current recovery. This plan is turning out rather well, with those purchases showing a 20% gain over a couple of months. By the year end I will probably take the profit and put the money into ORCL.

Looking at things from 10 miles up, the current decade has been a challenging one to begin investing in! The FTSE 100 will almost certainly end the decade lower than it started it. So I don't feel too bad about showing a loss. And maybe the next decade will be like the 1990s?

That would be refreshing!