Equities Strategy

Sound advice, particularly avoiding looking when market down turn

How about Fundsmith? I know not a tracker, but seems to be mentioned a lot

Any tips on CGT, seen bed and breakfasting via ISA or spouse to avoid 30d rule. Is it worth selling and buying to realise gains and use CGT allowances?

I go down the self-select ISA/SIPP route. I prefer not to use funds because of the fees but I agree it is very difficult to time the market. While I actively manage my accounts I try to resist the urge to look at it frequently and over trade. Typically I buy and hold with a 1-5 year time horizon and so trading is infrequent. This gets around the problem of trying to compete with pro investors/algos. Buy to invest and not trade. Passive funds have worked well over the last 10 years but that may not hold true going forward. I view active management/investment skills as the same as any other area of personal development - something to work on and improve slowly over time. 

I'm no expert but my tips would be:

1) Position size. Maintain discipline regarding the amount of a single stock/fund you own and the total amount invested in stocks relative to other asset classes. If the market crashes other investment classes often compensate which helps me to sleep easy. 

2) Treat "cash" as a valuable asset class/investment position in its own right. Always have 10-20% cash as "dry powder". While it gets eroded by inflation stock markets will generally correct at least 10% once a year and every 7-10 years potentially more i.e. 20-40%. As these sell-offs happen invest the cash. When the market recovers or is doing well ensure you build the cash position back up. This reduces the skill required in stock picking as everything you buy will generally be better value.

3) This is the hardest part - a contrarian mindset. Buy when there is fear and sell when there is complacency. Easier said than done but the 20% cash position tip really helps with this. Generally there will always be a reversion to the mean so invest with that in mind.  A good example would be Brexit. I invested my entire cash position in the days after the referendum because despite all the Chicken Little's running around in the media I knew that the world would keep turning and Britain would almost certainly be ok long term. Nearly all those purchases are up between 20% and 50%. As the market has risen I trimmed those positions and saved more cash to get myself back to 20%. I have made a few further investments during the recent 10% drop but still have plenty of cash left if it drops even further.

I think all these points are relevant to P2P. For example:

Tip 1 - In P2P you want to have similar discipline in terms of individual loan size and overall P2P investment levels vs other asset classes. This is the easiest way to sleep easy at night.
Tip 2 - Forget "cash drag" and see it as a valid investment position. Keep dry powder for when everyone freaks out and good loan opportunities present themselves.
Tip 3 - Be contrarian and try to be objective. For example I think the negativity towards Lendy is overdone and there are opportunities there. I think people who invest in MT simply because of "good communications" and because they "like them" are now paying for this mistake. Use the overly emotional people as barometers of investor sentiment and try to do the opposite without contravening tip 1.

As an alternative to the active/passive fees debate it could be worth a look at Orbis investments who over the last few years have made more of a push in the UK to private investors but based more in Australia/Far East and in institutional investing i believe (but the UK part is based here & under FCA )
         They have a system based on a capped fee if they beat the benchmark and a rebate if they miss so an incentive for them hopefully and the funds seem well rated on Morningstar & Trustnet etc

regarding point 3 - on the QT could you let me know when shares are going up 

Nope, it is not simple.

If it was then you would easily be a multimillionaire by now from the strategy.

Every small cap fund would be shooting the lights out,  have you seen woodfords patient capital trust recently?

I don't think this is good advice for the majority of investors.

I learned the hard way trying to make money on junior oil, gold and biotech stocks.  They are like rocket fuel, might shoot to the moon but highly likely to explode in your face.

Fortunately, I was at the early stage of my investment life so no serious permanent damage done to my net worth

stevio , this is what I do. I don't have the data to see if I would have been better buying and holding VWRL, and even if I have done better there is a good chance that is purely because of luck and, or because of information and ideas I had in the past that I can't necessarily repeat in the future.

I have highlighted in bold the five main differences from a a pure tracker strategy, such as  hazellend , in order of what I expect is increasing deviation from that strategy. My 'equity' investments include bond, property and commodity ETFs.

I use several (mainly low cost physical replicating ETF) funds to create my portfolio as I don't believe there is a single index I want to track. In particular I expect to live in the UK for the rest of my life and most of my liabilities will correlate more closely with the UK economy than the world as a whole. I hold more FTSE 100 and FTSE 250 than a global index would hold (6% in the case of VWRL). I am increasingly worried about some of these indices as there are clearly fashions for taking more of some sectors public or private and for companies listing in other countries , but I haven't worked out what to do about this yet.

Because I hold several investments I re-balance after big moves. Read up the work of Claude Shannon for more information. This brings my portfolio back to my original target. When the market does badly the opportunities are often greater.

I have money outside tax wrappers, so I re-balance to lock in capital losses and make use of my annual CGT allowance. If the ISA limit stays as high as it is now this will become less of a problem. I switch from one investment to a heavily correlated one so I don't have to worry about 30 day rule, sometimes I buy the same investment inside a pension or ISA. I can often do this with the above. I also own some VCTs which I have bought both in primary issuance and on the secondary market. These have tax free dividends, which is nice, but the rules have become much more strict recently and so I haven't bought any of these in the last two years.

I have a small experiment based on value investing which I need to invest more time, but haven't recently. Every now and then I sell some of the most expensive thing in my portfolio and buy two or three of the cheapest markets, using CAPE (that have an ETF which I can easily buy). For more on this read about Benjamin Graham or Robert Schiller. I am not rigorous enough with this, and I am currently rethinking it a little, because it is hard to get the data I need; when the oil price fell the markets on many oil producing nations looked cheap, but I'm not sure that they necessarily were. This is not a strategy for nervous investors.

And this is when the pure trackers will start to scream; my target holdings change over time, to hold more when they are cheap and less when expensive. When the markets seemed cheap eight or so years ago I was geared longer than  100% (not very much); now I'm not. For most of the last 20 years I have owned some conventional gilts, but a few years ago I started selling these and holding cash instead. And more relevant to this forum I used to hold a large amount in P2P, but that has fallen considerably, and this remaining is (hopefully) lower risk, so I have increased some of my other investments.