Portfolio housekeeping & 2018 performance

Having decided to try to get a bit more serious about my investments I thought the new year should start with some housekeeping. There were a few things irritating me about my record keeping:

• drip feeding money in made it difficult to assess performance
• automatic dividend reinvesting
• tracking costs

Problem 1 - I've unitised the portfolio. There's a great post about this on Monevator, it's a lot easier than I thought and really helps to cut through the noise created by adding in funds.

Problem 2 - As I was lazy I was automatically investing dividend payments. This made keeping track of what I had invested a bit of a headache. Although a case can be made for thinking of this as pound cost averaging in a sense, it was pushing up costs, and purchasing small numbers of shares where on reflection I didn't necessarily want more invested. So that is now cancelled, and I will be reinvesting once a pot of dividends has accumulated.

Problem 3 - I was trying to separate all costs to track them, and to build them into tracking portfolio performance but this was complicated by problem 2. I've now decided to still keep a record of all costs, but I've now built this into the original price of the share. So the original price against which I'll track is price + costs, making life lots easier.

So having spent some time tidying up, getting ducks in a row, the 2018 performance ended up being -1.4%. Not great since objective 1 is to not lose money. However, it compares favourably to the FTSE All Share, I'm taking the Vanguard FTSE All Share Accumulation fund as my initial benchmark (maybe a global tracker would ultimately be more sensible...one thing at a time...), which ended the year -5.4%. A quick look at the monthly movements indicated that my portfolio is more stable, dropping and rising less than the index, which if it continues I'll be happy with.