Stocks & bonds : News and discussion

Very nice.

I invest through funds in an ISA.

With low £/$ rate and high valuations I try not to buy any funds with high weightings to the USA markets as a result. However if circumstances change I will not hesitate, as historically that's where the greatest returns are.

I was investing into Europe via two good funds but with the strengthening Euro that's stopped.

This month's regular investments are going mainly into UK growth, with a bit into India and Global Infrastructure.

In fact high stock market valuations is a strong driver of my P2P investments!

Portfolio is up 0.59% today 

Yep, got it in the bookmarks. 

Edit: I should check it more often, India is high, but high future growth is priced in there though I suppose. Also it doesn't take currency into account.

Passive vs Active is kinda like Autobid vs manual due diligence in P2P!

I do compare my active funds against relevant benchmarks and indexes to make sure they're worth it.

If I didn't have the time/interest to manage my investments I would just buy the cheapest global tracker and be done with it, and get a very respectable return.

Passive funds: guaranteed to underperform the index (average), they buy up everything, including the poor stocks.

Autobid (e.g. on Funding Circle): Buys up all the loan parts, including the ones that send alarm bells ringing when you do DD on them.

Yes passives outperform the majority of actively managed funds, in the USA. In the UK it's 50%, In Europe 70% of actives outperform. Source: The Telegraph and Morningstar.

I am not saying trackers are worse by any means, there's a place for both.

I agree and my strategy is similar.

It will be interesting to see how markets cope with the reduction of QE and interest rate rises.

Did you know that the Bank Of Japan is the biggest shareholder in dozens of Japanese companies, due to their QE programme buying ETFs!

By active/passive I meant the strategy rather than the source of those funds (ambiguous word, I mean money!).  I suspect it's very difficult to get figures for who holds what type.
I've never quite understood why there is a distinction between passive funds and ETFs, putting aside the mechanics of the investment, fundamentally they are collective funds attempting to track an index.  In the UK, it would be like separating active investments into direct holdings, funds and ITs (I say UK because I'm not sure whether IT structures are UK specific).
I'm sceptical of active vs passive fund performance comparisons because of vested interests, there is an awful lot of money collected in fees which the industry will do all it can to keep hold of - passive investing is a threat to those fees.  There are ways of spinning the numbers to suit, survivorship bias for example.