MAKING BAD (INVESTMENT) DECISIONS IN A PANDEMIC

Many investors fell into the trap of either selling stocks at depressed prices during the March market rout, or cashing in their pensions.

- Brendan Peacock

As a journalist who has won an award for consumer education, having written countless articles punting good financial sense on behalf of the experts I regularly interview, the exercise of looking back on my personal investment portfolio’s performance through the Covid-19 period in 2020 induces shame.

The thing is, I’ve worked for myself for the last two years and the pressure to manage a personal portfolio – which I constructed over and above my paid-up pension from my last period of formal employment and a few retirement annuities – increases exponentially when it’s your nest egg rather than a plaything made up of discretionary income.

I bought a textbook on investment management and tried to refine my valuation skills. I learned about portfolio construction, risk management, and technical analysis. In some instances, I was lucky – I bought into Aspen right at the bottom, when the market fretted about the company’s ballooning debt, doubling my money on the drugmaker in less than a year. I sold out of MTN, which is still sliding, and beefed up my Aspen position.

In the first quarter of 2020, I held a tax-free savings account dominated by the Ashburton Global 1200 ETF (which has since changed the name to the Global 1200 Equity Fund of Funds ETF), as well as a small discretionary portfolio of shares: Afrimat, Altron, Aspen, Capitec and the CoreShares S&P Global Property ETF.

When lockdown struck hard in June, I took action to try reducing my losses, selling out of Afrimat, Altron, Capitec, and the global property ETF. At the same time, I bought some shares at depressed valuations for my wife’s account in what have proved to be more astute transactions, but what I wanted was to pare my own losses.