A few weeks ago I decided to fire my broker (for poor service) and decided to hire a portfolio manager to manage my positions. “Whaaaat??” You must be thinking. But if you, like me, hold a day-to-day job, it makes sense because managing an active portfolio in the way I want to is really 24 hour job. This is because I intend to employ different strategies for different allocations in my portfolio. The breakdown in my equity is roughly as follows: 70% long-term (fundamental), 30% short-term (speculative).

If you read my previous posts, I have you can get a pretty good idea of what my fundamental strategy is. I score companies into a watchlist, then delve deeper by reading their annuals and quarterlies, and then I shortlist a list of candidates to buy and then I try to acquire them on technical weakness. Easy enough thing to do but extremely time consuming. So in the past few months I have been hunting for a portfolio manager who shares this method, and I have hired him to keep this aspect of my portfolio rolling. I can’t tell you how excited I am about having this arrangement in place because it will free up so much of my time. I also happen to think this fella has an excellent ability to identify great companies. At the same time, I also fired my existing broker and found another individial who is not only passionate about the equity market, but who clicks with me. So just like building a team at work, I have also built a “team” around my trading portfolio and surrounded myself with people who love to trade.
In order to ensure that we all have a clean track record, I have also decided to liquidate all my positions and move everything to cash so that we start with afresh. Right now my new trading account is open and my bank instructions have been issued. I just need to tie up a few more loose ends before we can all start trading.

That will leave me with time to focus on the more speculative aspects of my portfolio, which I am developing a different strategy for. Will post on more of this later…

Oh 1 more thing: because I am paying my portfolio manager, out of respect for his efforts and services to me unfortunately I cannot post our portfolio positions on this blog. However, I will continue to post up my speculative positions and company scorecards.