Roundtable Discussion; The Future of Mineral Sands. Watch the video here.
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It's always interesting to see what other investors are doing. I haven't much interest in "crypto", so my "alternatives" have been around social & green infrastructure. Mainly debt and some unlisted equity. Oil is so out of favour that I'm only exposed in a very small way through a debt issue. The "green" listed market is over heated in my opinion and I see more value in secured green debt and green start-ups. There's often SEIS & EIS on offer. I did one the other day with an implied yield of 10% once you'd taken the SEIS (a tax rebate) into consideration and all it's income was from the NHS/Local Government. Like a distressed Muni, but with HMG providing a "gilt hedge". With social infrastructure you can get 5-6% yield from long term property leases where the lease is in principal underwritten by HMG. One of the areas they really interests me is litigation funding. It's easy in the US, but for the UK we have Burford (now listed over there) and AxiaFunder. There can be eye watering returns. If I was generating more income in $ I'd explore the US options. Land, as they say, isn't being made any more, so it's always attractive. My portfolio is over weight in property, which has been a pain last year, but it could be an area which could provide some real opportunities for capital and income. I hold physical Gold and Silver, the Gold at c$700, the Sliver c£16. I'm watching PHAU.L & GDX on a weekly basis. If we get a couple of years of roaring 20's then I'll be taking some of the income an buying gold if there's substantive weakness. People have short memories, so will be dumping gold to buy equities, forgetting there's going to be another period of the stress coming down the tracks at some stage. I think you may be right about trimming your gold. Unless you have a very long horizon. I do, I'm focused on intergenerational investing, so buying it when it's moved out of fashion appeals. If it's at a price I like. Very Diversified Assets is what I'm about. It's amazing what's available to private investors these days. To give you a flavour, in the last 6 weeks I've invested in:
"City" (as in City of London) property, E-car charging points start-up, Pharma royalty payments, index linked regional property, social impact start-up, FTSE 100 index , diversified manufacturing group (listed), FTSE 250 high yield index, short date global high yield bonds, litigation financing, ORB listed "oiler" debt, local organic multi-unit food retailer and Premium Bonds!
- and nothing into stamps :)
Principal is going in a very diversified set of assets. 80% in Equities with about half in the US, and the other half split between UK, China and Japan (nothing in EU other than VW). The other 20% mainly in crypto, with 25% in Bitcoin 25% in Eth and the other half sitting in various DeFi tokens with Polkadot being the largest of the other tokens. Lastly a very small residual amount left in Gold and Silver. I think I will move this to other hard assets. The area which intrigues me most is farmland which currently I hold via some US holdings such as LAND but I do see options for direct investment in yielding farms as interesting.
I think that's a wise move. There's a decent enough chance of a bull run on the FTSE for the next couple of years, it would be very easy to miss out on that by sitting here. I'm still accumulating ISF, IUKD and NCYF and toying with a similar strategy with INXG, UK inflation linked gilts, even with the -2% real yield. There's a couple of stocks that I'm buying that have shown some recovery, but are way off their early 2020 averages. Running your profits is decent tactic, but where to deploy the principal? That's the most vexing of questions at the moment. I recently added BPCR to my long term portfolio, they are paying special dividend in the next couple of days. That kind of largess is the exception at the moment LOL I'm running my portfolio profits, but cost averaging on indexes and "adding" where I can see distressed share prices, but recovering business, from portfolio income. That feel like the right strategy. It's quite possible the present rally could reverse....I've had decent enough 12 months with my portfolio is showing c14% upside, that's just above my long standing average. Which probably says a lot about the type of investor I am. Very happy to keep growing c10% + pa for the next decade. Lets hope!
I was pretty bullish on the company but have gone cold after seeing just how hot almost every other part of the collectible markets has become. The fact that products like RallyRd and others which have helped boost the collectibles market have entirely overlooked stamps / coins is either a big opportunity or yet another miss for the stamp/coin community. I think likely the latter. I halved my position on one of the daily spikes and took out my principal and am only letting my profits now run on this one.
It doesn't sound promising. The investment based recovery has 30 years weight on it's shoulders and tech savvy young generation not seeing through marketing hype? I think relevance is the key issue. I'm afraid a "fashion" driven recovery doesn't sound a compelling bullet point in the deck. I think I'll stick with my original view. Nice if you are controlling the debt. Mid to long term recovery, but without a substantial shake up in the management aspiration, then I'm not that confident about the equity. It could take them a few more years to get back to stability. From there, there might be some opportunity. My concern is that debt holders will snaffle all that before it trickles down to the equity participants.
I think it is interesting that the professional grading and encapsulation of stamps has not caught on in the same way as other items (comics, cards etc) which make these much more fungible and tradeable as investible assets. Relevance is obviously a big part of it but coins seem to be in slightly better shape than stamps. But likely a lot of this could come down to marketing and the need for someone to be the accessible face of stamp collecting to energize the space. Without this unlikely to deliver the gains people wish for as the "hobby" is unlikely to catch fire again without the investment component leading the way.
I suspect a lot of it has to does with relevance. If you are under 60, maybe even 70, are stamps relevant? I collected them for a small time in my childhood, before more interesting and exciting option supported by TV came along, my godchildren...well you know the answer to that.
For the over 60's they may be more focused on income generation than speculation, and if they are interested in speculation equity has provided much better returns that stamps for the last 30 years (or so).
For investors, well I've held precious metals in physical form, rounds over coins as it's often more cost effective )and via ETF's and block-chain (physical stock secured)). Stamps, never as an investment...
They may yet come back into fashion, but I'm not seeing any evidence.
SGI may recover and be a nice little business for it's debt holder. The equity, less attractive than it's debt for me.
What I find perplexing is how all things collectable (had assets): comic books, baseball cards, pokemon cards, etc etc are at crazy highs.
Folks who provide professional grading services like https://www.collectiblesgroup.com/ have huge backlogs and cannot hire staff fast enough and yet stamps/coins have really gone nowhere. I am bullish on the collectibles space and hope the contagion spreads but so far little sign unless I am missing something.