March’s Monthly Performance

March’s monthly performance across all my listed investments was -0.76%. YTD (Year to date) performance is negative at -2.59%.

Top 5 company holdings: $EZPW, $BATS, $RIO, $CAML, $INPP. The REITS income fund has ended the month up 5.95%. GOLD and SILVER ETC holdings were down -2.72%. Fund of funds down -4.09%.

Tariffs, Taxes & Tantrums:

Last month I said markets like stability and Trump is anything but stable, but wow… the last couple of days have been crazy on the markets with the USA S&P down 15% over the last month and the UK All Share down 9.5%.

So my only remotely good news this month is that I beat the market by only losing -1.20%. Yay me!

The question of course now is does this present a buying opportunity or will there be more bad news to come and what do the tariffs accomplish?

I think like most people tariffs are not really anything I put a lot of thought into as I’m not an importer or exporter, although on occasion I have come up against them and they always surprise.

About 9 years ago we did a family cruise around Singapore, Thailand, Cambodia, Malaysia, Vietnam and I remember doing a tour in Malaysia looking at the Petronas Towers in Kuala Lumpur and we commented on the lack of any European or American cars on the road, not a single one.

The tour guide told us that no one can afford them as they have well over 100% import taxes (aka tariffs) on them.

As we travelled around that part of the world we found that there were tariffs and taxes on all these various imported goods purely to keep them out of the countries. Even then we all thought that’s pretty unfair on European and American companies.

So much for free trade and free market capitalism.

Those countries would argue they are protecting their industries from imports and helping their own industries grow, which is probably true as well.

I know you’re not allowed to have this opinion anymore (especially on social media) but… Multiple things can be true at the same time. It doesn’t have to be one or the other, you’re with us or you’re against us, you’re left or you’re right, you’re Trump or you’re those socialist idiots.

I once was fortunate enough to go over to America to pickup an aircraft. This was purchased and paid for in the USA and after a few weeks I flew it back to the UK (via Canada, Greenland and Iceland) and on landing in the UK you are hit with a VAT bill of 20%. Just because. That certainly felt like an import tax when the bill arrived and HAD to be paid otherwise the aircraft would be seized from you if it operated in the UK and Europe.

On the other side of this one of my previous companies was an e-commerce platform which competed against Canadian/American giants like Shopify who were able to sell their services to UK customers without having to charge VAT while we had to charge VAT and thus were 20% less competitive in our own home market.

Cross border tax, tariffs, and VAT are complicated subjects. Who benefits and who loses is a complicated business and so you have to look past the media headlines which are either saying Trumps move is great or Trumps move is bad depending on their politics.

While none of us know what will happen next in markets I do wonder if as the tariffs start to drop in other countries and the USA drops their in turn if we will see some massive moves back up.

Is this a buying opportunity for all those people who wished they had bought during the previous crashes like the .com bust, Brexit, Covid, the global financial crisis etc?