Sunday, August 04, 2019

Designing a Portfolio for Baby Moomin

I decided that the best provider of investment bonds is Generation Life. This is mainly because they seem to be scandal free, not about to be sold off to an overseas manager, and have lower fees than other providers. Next I needed to pick an investment portfolio from their investment options. I decided on the following rules and criteria:
  1. 50/50 equities/fixed income and alternatives
  2. 50/50 passive and active management
  3. 50/50 Australian and international assets
  4. Pick the best fund from alternatives in each of these niches - focusing on long-term "alpha" and in particular their performance during the Global Financial Crisis and the recent December 2018 mini-crash.
This is the resulting portfolio:

50% Dimensional World Allocation 50/50 Trust. Here I compared a Vanguard balanced fund with this fund. In the long run, DFA have done much better than Vanguard:
Here, Portfolio 1 is a DFA stock fund and Portfolio 3 the Vanguard equivalent. The equity curves are for someone withdrawing 5% per year in retirement. Portfolio 2 is a DFA 60/40 stock/bond portfolio. The difference is stunning. Recently, DFA hasn't done as well as value stocks are out of favor. I am betting on them coming back. If there is a major market correction we might shift this core holding to a more aggressively equity focused fund.

10% Ellerston Australian Market Neutral Fund. Ellerston has done horribly in the past year, but prior to that it did very well for a market neutral fund. It now seems to be rebounding. This fund manager originally managed James Packer's money and then branched out.

10% Magellan Global Fund. This has been one of the best Australia based international equity funds. It did particularly well during the GFC.

10% Magellan Infrastructure Fund. This fund seems better than the other real estate options. It didn't do very well during the GFC, but all the others were worse.

10% Generation Life Tax Effective Australian Share Fund. This fund is managed by Redpoint Investments. The idea is to tilt a bit towards tax effective Australian shares given the high taxes on this investment bond overall. The manager is pretty much an index hugger, but the other options for actively managed Australian shares seem worse.

5% PIMCO Global Bond Fund. PIMCO is the gold standard for actively managed bonds. I decided to split my allocation to PIMCO between international bonds and

5% PIMCO Australian Bond Fund, as Australian bonds have actually done very well recently.

1 comment:

enoughwealth@yahoo.com said...

Generation Life is on the approved product list of my AFSL and it they seemed like quite a good product provider when they presented for a recent CPD webinar.