29 March 2008 [0 comments]

Q: 

If you are lucky enough to have a portfolio of, say, £50k, I would say that ‘diversifying your portfolio’ as a way of reducing the impact of market falls on one’s wealth was common sense.
For those of us without that sort of money, what are our options to protect more modest sums? Most brokers and others I encounter are not interested because giving advice is costly to them and out of proportion to the commission they may receive.
I favour monthly savings schemes and currently have a unit trust holding in a special situations fund worth about £6k. This has been replaced by another unit trust savings scheme, only this time in an income fund worth around £1k. The
fund has a good record of producing above-average dividend and capital growth. Both are within ISAs.
I recently inherited about £30k and want to invest around 50 per cent of it in the stock market. How do I start to diversify and protect the value of my investments?
Should I spread the money evenly around top-performing funds in Europe, America and emerging markets, or ‘drip feed’ the money into these sectors to avoid any timing problems? Am I best sticking to unit or investment trusts, accepting the bid/offer spread or going for single-priced OEICs?
Mr J Treacy, via email

There are currently no comments on this post.