Thus far I've been reluctant to look too closely at what happened after I sold - after all I don't really want to know that I've missed out on oodles of potential profit. Today I've decided to bite the bullet and go digging, to see whether I really would have been better sitting on my hands.
Firstly, here are the shares I've sold, and what I replaced them with:
- IEER, swapped into IEEM.
- IFFF, swapped into IEEM.
- LTAM, swapped into IEEM.
- EDD, sold in order to buy more ZRX.
- ZRX, sold because I was fed up; the proceeds went into NWBD.
- TW, sold because I was fed up; the proceeds went into BATS and NG.
- HSBA, sold in order to buy CPT.
- RBS, sold mostly in order to buy LLPF, although some proceeds went into BATS and NG.
- LLOY, sold in order to buy GSK.
- LLPF, sold in order to buy LLPC.
Let's take a look at those and see how I did.
Emerging market ETFs
I swapped IEER, IFFF and LTAM into IEEM in order to simplify my portfolio. I expected the returns from IEEM to be almost identical.
Since then IEER, IFFF and LTAM are up an average of 94%, whereas IEEM is up 79%. Not disastrous, but clearly I would have been better off not interfering on this occasion.
EDD
This one stings. I sold EDD to buy more ZRX shares. Since then EDD is up 220%, and ZRX is down 90% (although I sold ZRX after it had fallen a mere 40%). Ouch. I should really take a look at what's been happening at EDD since I sold, and work out where I went wrong - but let's save this for another day.
ZRX
I sold my Zirax shares after a brief rally, and for once managed to get my timing spot on. After I sold they fell over 80% (and will be delisted next Monday). Shame I ever held the shares in the first place, but at least I picked a good time to sell. Furthermore, the proceeds went into NWBD, which is since up 22%.
TW
Taylor Wimpey is another share where I sold out after taking heavy losses. They're unchanged from when I sold (although along the way there were better selling opportunities at about 50p). I didn't really sell in order to buy anything in particular, but after a couple of weeks the cash went into BATS and NG, which have since returned about 20%, so I think I'll count this one a success.
Bank shares
HSBC has risen 33% since I sold them (not including dividends), whereas CPT has returned a total of 18% even including dividends. So chalk that one down as another error.
RBS is down 30% since I sold; the proceeds of this sale went into NG (up 15%), BATS (up 25%) and LLPF (up 152% when I sold).
LLOY is down 37%, although there once you adjust for the rights issue that's only about 20%. All the proceeds of that went into GSK, which is up 7% since then.
Finally there's the trade I made from LLPF into LLPC. There were 3 outcomes for LLPF: holding onto them, taking Lloyds' cash offer, or exchanging for LB1G ECNs. Holding onto them would have lost me 12%, but realistically I would never have done that. Exchanging for cash would have given me an extra 2%. The ECNs are now trading significantly above the level that LLPF was pre-exchange, and they would have netted me 15%. In the meantime I'm roughly where I started with LLPC, down only 1%.
Conclusion
OK, so 6 out of 10 sales lost me money once I take into account what I did with the proceeds. On the other hand, my average profit on a successful sale was more than triple my losses on a bad sale. And that disastrous EDD to ZRX swap was more than outweighed by the stonking profits when I traded in RBS for LLPF.
On the whole I've done pretty well. If I'd kept these 10 shares, they would now be up 8%. But the shares I've replaced them with have given me a return of 35%.
So tinkering turns out to have been a smart move after all - although I think I'll be resisting the temptation to do much more of it. Masterful inactivity is the order of the day.
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