In what has been a tumultuos period, we ended the financial year slightly ahead of the previous year. Whilst a positive return of 4.9% is not great, it’s certainly better than last years -14.2% and helps us recover some of the lost value.
One of the strategies is to keep costs down by not over-reacting to almost daily events. Buying and selling is always risky and saving brokerage fees helps to retain some value of what we hold. Nevertheless, the past year has seen a few companies suffer due to tough times (i.e. restructures or being taken over). These include Andomeda (ADN), Archer (AXE), Hazer (HZR), Total Brain (TTB), Cann, Bigtincan (BTC), Skillz (SKLZ), and ZIP in particular adding to the downside of valuations.
These companies could quickly rebound to former valuations if the wars ceased and interest rates were to fall. Of course, that is not likely to happen this calender year but by June 2024 anything is possible.
Even defensive Gold shares have not protected us as much as we hoped but there continues to be some benefits coming through after June that are helping stabilise returns.
On the upside, companies like Boss Energy (BOE), Camplify (CHL), Fortescue Metals (FMG), Qantas (QAN), Tesla (TSLA), and Weebit (WBT) helped our recovery during this period.
Losses were realised on some or all our holdings in Archer, ZIP, and Cann respectively. These were sold to offset some of the income from dividends and interest during this period such that a net loss means no distributions were required to be made. As there is little point making distributions whilst the fund still has unrealised losses that we have yet to recover. It is our strategy to make future distributions only when these losses have been fully recovered. This is an important issue to manage or we could have the situation where we continue to increase unrealised losses and yet are ordered to pay tax on “taxable income”.
In addition, we have paid a significant subscription to help us get the views from other technical chartists that continue to suggest that there are many obstacles ahead and that global stock markets are generally over valued. This means it could be more than a year before company earnings stablise and provide a solid base for further market rises – including falling interest rates once inflation fears are also back under control. As a result, we need to listen to the technical traders and remain cautious about making additional investments, keep some cash reserves, and wait for the correct time to move back into stocks. These traders are generally making their return from falling markets by “shorting” (i.e. selling) stocks. But this has become quite difficult for new participants as more regulations have been put in place to limit the ability to “borrow” stocks (i.e. because they don’t own them) from others to do this. But another way is to buy and sell options. However, this method is more expensive and also erodes part of the benefits of a “short play” (the first time we used this method it actually cost us with no real benefit either because markets were very volatile). Thus it’s always challenging to action the trader’s recommendations due to the limitations placed on us – not to mention the usually short time frame available at the recommended price levels. However, we may consider a special registration to allow us to “borrow” if it’s possible? Although we have to be mindful of whether we are investors or traders? A trader is usally having to watch the market frequently and timing is very critical because target prices often only are reached briefly. That’s not something we generally want to recommend as there’s many other better things to do with our life which are more important than watching sharemarkets all day. It’s also something that Warren Buffet and many other wealthy people agree with. Although it is possible to place orders for trades at specific price targets, often it’s better to place the order “at market” so that we can immediately take advantage of any excessive movements for even greater returns (which is what traders are doing).
Here’s the consolidated Portfolio with our position and results: Aware-Inv-Portfolio 30-6-23
The related financial reports from our brokers are: Aware_Investors_Pty_Ltd_EOFY report June_2023 and Bell Direct – Investors EOY 2023.
Finally the Cryptocurrencies have stabilised and done very little but patience is needed as these could one day make a resurgance because of wars and other regulations making this more appealing to various investors. Note: that even in less than a minute, the valuations between the holdings and Wallet details moved by a few dollars – demonstrating their volatility.
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