RE: Some thoughts1 Sep 2022 13:47
"You don't strike me as being an astute investor. I would imagine ( am very confident) that the majority (if not all )of funds are/have lightened their equity holdings to increase their liquidity and capitalise on any significant drop in market prices. Why buy at 2 when you can buy at 1 down the line.As you say markets are forward looking and sentiment is leaning towards a recession. To protect/hedge your position you increase your liquidity through raising cash and reducing equity . You don't have to be a market guru to realise this, just common sense.this logic applies since the creation of markets."
Depends on your defifinition of "astute", if you're suggesting I haven't got a crystal ball advising me on the movement of markets due to unforeseen macro events, then you're correct. As far as liquidity, we have savings but we're choosing not to use them, since we don't need to and even though I don't like holding cash everyone needs some savings. If you look at our investments, which I view as already priced at severe recessionary valuations, there isn't much to be knocked off their prices from here imo, so there's little to lose from reducing our average cost per share now.
Lloyds is currently just above 43p, lets say we invest the full £10,000 into Lloyds shares at around 43p a share, it will add over 23,000 shares to our current holding taking our total to over 400,000 shares. Lloyds have recently increased their interim dividend from 0.67p to 0.8p, which is an increase of 19% and assuming the Final is increased by the same percentage, it will increase to 1.58p from last years 1.33p. On the extra 23000 Lloyds shares alone, the final dividend will return £363, or a total of over £6,320 on the 400,000 plus shares we'll then hold; Forward looking, our Lloyds shares will return over £9,582 in Dividends in the next 12 months.
There's no guarantee that any of my stocks will drop significantly from here, like there's no guarantee Ryanair wont drop back to the €8 range, but that's the chance you take, otherwise you just sit on your hands and constantly await a lower price that may never come. Personally I think a recession is already more than priced into stocks, so I'll ignore the rhetoric around funds moving into cash to build war chest's and add when I see fit, if cash is sitting on the sidelines it could just as easily flow back into the market next month rather than next year.
Should we choose to reinvest all our dividends going forward, that means we can increase our holdings by £21,000 in the next 12 months, and probably more in subsequent years, if that isn't growth I don't know what is and at some point our stocks are likely to revisit historic fair valuations. I'm more than happy not being an "astute" investor.