Congrats @tomsmithidg! And thanks for the kind words.

Certainly great to have you onboard @tomsmithidg and to have met you in person at the Brissie catchup (geez, we must do that again soon....@mikebrisy the gurus organiser). Whilst I've been severely under the pump on the home front of late (family Funerals and estate issues to name a few) and been very slack in posting on SM, I've still been able to read a lot of posts and to watch and read your significant contributions. Great work mate and hope to catch up again soon!!

It's been great trading investment ideas with you @tomsmithidg - and a 22% return for 12 months ain't too shabby at all. One thing that might make your next 12 months even better would be to hold less positions, so rate your positions in order of highest conviction and/or best risk/reward trade-off down to least, and cull some of the ones at the bottom and reinvest that cash into the remainder.

I say this only because you have 37 positions on your Strawman scorecard (i.e. in your Strawman.com virtual portfolio) and 11 of those positions (almost one third of them) are below 0.5% weighting. If any one of those 11 that are between 0.1% and 0.4% of your portfolio was to double or triple from here, it will hardly move the needle on your returns because the positions are so small.

As you gain confidence and conviction in your favourite companies, increase your exposure to those companies when the price on offer makes sense to do so, and fund that by selling off the small change at the bottom of the list.

The advantages are:

1. You will have less companies to follow closely so you can do more research on the ones you still hold, their competitors, their industry dynamics, etc, plus have more time to search for new ideas; and
2. When one of their share prices moves up, it will have more impact on your overall portfolio value, or if this is done in real life, positive impact on your overall financial worth.

As an example I give you LYL and GNG which are the only two companies I've held in my income portfolio (IPF) since I established my SPF (speccy portfolio) in April last year. Those two portfolios are where I hold companies too small to be in the ASX300, because my larger SMSF can only hold ASX300 companies. If you look at the charts of those two, or see how I'm doing on them here on SM (+28.85% pa on LYL, most of that in the past 7 months, +35.67% on GNG, most of that in the past 8 months), you can see that it's been worthwhile.

In my SMSF I usually hold somewhere between 7 and 14 companies. Same with my SPF, currently 12 in my SPF. All up, across all of those portfolios I've never held more than 26 companies at any one time in recent years, and that number is only as high as it is because I'm fully retired and doing this full time now. If I was still working for a salary or wages somewhere and had less time to spend on investing, it would be a lower number, somewhere around 10 to 15 companies I reckon.

Diversification can easily become diworsification when you have positions so small that they aren't going to move the dial even if they double or triple. They become more of a distraction than a positive.

Now that's how I look at things, others may have different opinions, but as someone who is clearly eager to learn and consider alternative views and ideas, I reckon that is something I ought to suggest to you purely based on your SM portfolio here, so I am.

Congrats on the 1 year anniversary and the excellent year 1 return. Great start!

Congrats @tomsmithidg ... wonderful returns that I can only dream about from my speccy-biotech-and-now-increasingly-speccy-SaaS world!

As @lowway said, it was great to meet you in person at the Brisbane Strawman meetup. I stand ready to organise any future event when there is a critical mass of interested members.

That is, of course, assuming my insistence on sticking-to-my-SaaS-knitting and perennial biotech punts haven't reduced me to zero, in which case I will quietly fade away.

For now I remain (...as long as @Strawman doesn't change the algorithm....),

The One True Golden Rosella To Rule The All

Nice work @tomsmithidg I second @Bear77 view on conviction and concentration. Often less is more and your time and focus is worth a lot so make each investment decision as impactful as possible. Lots of small positions that don't move the dial become a time sink. That said, nothing wrong with starting small and building up a position as part of a process, just about optimising the minimum weighting to make that starting point worthwhile.

Noted @Bear77 , as always I appreciate your thoughts and advice. There is a little method to my madness, I'm testing theories and valuations, but don't have the conviction (Yet) to be replacing my high conviction positions. I am testing the waters without being prepared to risk/ sacrifice my overall (high conviction) portfolio returns just yet.