April's Monthly Performance

April’s monthly performance across all my listed investments was +6.79%. YTD (Year to date) performance is positive at +5.36%.

Top 5 company holdings: $BATS, $RIO, $EZPW, $GSL, $VTY.

The REITS income fund has ended the month up +8.44%.

GOLD and SILVER ETC holdings were up +7.44%.

Fund of funds up +3.81%.

Blood on the Streets

At the start of this month, it was the school holidays, and so I was taking a holiday with my family in Dubai and was sitting on a sun lounger in the Atlantis Palm Hotel, messaging a few friends of mine who are also investors. All were totally sick and couldn’t believe what was going on.

At the time, the FTSE All Share and FTSE 100 were down around 15% from their recent highs, while the S&P 500 was down over 20%, proper bear market territory.

I was down 12% across my entire portfolio. I’m very fortunate to have a pretty large portfolio, so the sums involved were eye-watering, and I could feel the panic starting to set in.

But sat there on the sun lounger, I thought to myself, what advice would I give to someone now if they asked? What would I write in this very monthly investment update?

It would be, of course, to “buy when there is blood on the streets” and all the other classic investing phrases such as…

• “Be fearful when others are greedy, and greedy when others are fearful.” – Warren Buffett

• “The time of maximum pessimism is the best time to buy.” – Sir John Templeton

Also, the drops made no sense on many of my investments; for example, one of my holdings is a healthcare homes REIT which buys and builds retirement homes and then rents them out to operators on 20+ year leases; the Trump tariffs were not going to affect them. Yet even they had dropped around 13% from recent highs.

It made no sense.

So with those things in mind, I kept my cool and on Monday the 7th, right towards the bottom of the market, I started to invest more money. It also timed really well with the new ISA limits (you get a full £20k tax-free allowance on the 6th April).

I basically invested across all my investments where I was sure had little to no impact from the tariffs and those which you could see on the technical charts had just dropped suddenly along with the overall market.

I then sat back and watched. It helped that I was on holiday and so had plenty of distractions from the screens.

It worked.

I have switched from a Year To Date performance last month of -2.59% to +5.36% this month. It’s actually my best-performing month on record, and I spent most of it in Dubai (which is probably telling me lots of things).