A position was eliminated from the fund last week. And a new one started. As is my custom, I will discuss the sold position.
We passed an important milestone this week. The original capital used to start EGP has now been doubled before fees (but after costs).
We are in the midst of what the financial media like to refer to as ‘confession season’, where companies are supposed to announce that they will fall short of market expectations.
I have talked often in these pages of the psychological elements of investing.
We are a small fund, with only 40 investors, but these investors never fail to impress me with their abilities. We have Doctors, Professors, Business Owners, Consultants and other persons employed across a wide variety of industries. They mostly leave me to do my work with their capital and I rarely hear from them, but when I do it is invariably a valuable contribution.
The financial year ended well for EGP. The widest performance margin we registered in all of FY2015 over our benchmark was set on 30 June 2015.
We appear on the cusp of one of the better comebacks since Lasse Virén won the Olympic 10,000 metre race in the 1972 Munich Olympics.
We almost had our 5th down week in 2015. Someone’s Friday afternoon buying in our largest holding saved the day. This is our 24th weekly report for 2015; so far I have only had to report a fall in asset values four times.
I am sick of hearing about housing prices.
The week just completed was the third worst week for our benchmark ASX200 index since the inception of EGP and the first time the market has declined by more than 4% since May 2012. The only two worse weeks for the benchmark since the fund began were in August & September 2011.
I spent this week in Kuala Lumpur; it has been an enormously useful week. You won’t see the impact on results in the short term, but the efforts of this week will pay dividends to fellow EGP investors in the coming weeks and years.
We removed another holding from the portfolio this week, bringing our total holdings down to 26.
It was a better week for the market this week after a couple of declines exceeding 2% per week. It was also a pretty good week for EGP; we hit a new all-time high and broke through a 10% total return for FY15 to date.
What a turnaround the last 11 weeks has brought.
We hit another all-time high this week. We have been up 15 out of 17 weeks so far in the 2015 calendar year. Such consistent returns should not be relied upon. When investing in listed stocks you need to be prepared for some bumps. Before you consider what happened to the market this week as much of a bump, remember the ASX200 (Total Return) is only 2.6% of its all-time Friday closing high, registered on March 20 this year.