Report for February 2009

We bought two £500 tranches of unit trusts during February: Jupiter North American Income and Gartmore European Selected Opportunities. This continues our realignment of our portfolio started last summer, but may in retrospect have been a bit premature. While the FTSE100 fell 9%, our portfolio fell 7% and the Unit Value only 4%; again suggesting that widening the scope of our holdings is paying off. The graph shows that over the last 70 months of analysis, our Unit Value and the FTSE100 have reached the same (low) value: i.e. our under-performance has gone.

The only holding to rise in value in the month was, interestingly, our China Growth Fund. Mining and natural resouces stocks are very volatile at present as expectations of world demand are lowered, and BHP Billiton suffered the worst drop in the month, 13%.