21-June-2024: Update: SM PF vs RL PFs = very different currently. Didn't really know where to post this, but here will do. Due to a number of reasons which I won't go into, I have during the past week fully liquidated my largest real money portfolio - now all cash - which I have mixed thoughts about - happy to have exited MIN and FMG before their SP falls over recent days and got 27 cps for GNX, which is good enough and almost $68 for ALU which is not too far short of Renesas' A$68.50/share offer, but wanted to get it all done before June 30, again, won't go into those reasons but there were a couple of them. Which meant exiting SWP (Swoop) very near their all-time low and selling LYL well below where I would have liked to have sold them. But I won't go on about timing. I'll just say that portfolio has beat the XJO (S&P/ASX200 Accumulation Index) over the 7.5 years that it's been operating (so since inception), but not beaten the index by as much as I'd hoped, and there were a few years where it underperformed the index, but the past couple of years have been good, and we've caught up, and it was a good time to wind that one up - while we're in front. It was mostly my family's money in it, but also some other investors, who are all happy with the way it all worked out. Good result in the end.

I have also made some changes in my SMSF, which was my second largest real money portfolio, so also got out of MIN and FMG, plus also sold my CDA, DVP, and in prior weeks also all of the NEU and S32 that I held there, and added Lynas (LYC), and two West African Gold Miners - PRU and WAF - because I think those two are going to be the exceptions to my "West Africa is just way too dangerous and risky to operate gold mines" rule - that I've managed to stick to for a few years now, up until the last fortnight, i.e. I've totally avoided investing in those African gold producers (or project developers), but PRU didn't care one bit and they shot the lights out without my blessing, and now I'm finally onboard the best two of the bunch, IMO... which probably means the top for gold for a while.

My Super now holds just 9 companies - in order from largest position down to smallest: NST, AD8, GMD, PNV, LYC, PRU, NWH, WAF and BGL, so there's five gold miners there in that nine that together represent around 60% of the direct investment portion of the portfolio - so of the 70% of my SMSF that is invested in those 9 companies, gold companies represent 60% of that portion, or around 42% of my SMSF. That SMSF also has about $80K of cash in it at this point in time (as of today - that might change as early as Monday), plus some managed funds including a managed infrastructure fund investment and about 20% of the portfolio balance in CBUS' high growth and balanced growth options. As I've mentioned previously, my SMSF is run through an industry super fund (CBUS), so I can directly invest 80% of it - but only in ASX300 companies (plus some ETFs and managed funds), so companies I would really like to include, like LYL, GNG, XRF and EGL, are off-limits for that portfolio until they get into the ASX300 index. Those were all held in my other portfolio - and have all been sold for now.

Outside of that SMSF, I have a one-stock portfolio for our two children, one of whom has just produced a beautiful grandaughter for us, so grandpa duties keep me busy sometimes these days. Life is good. Especially since I retired from paid work two months ago. The company in that one-stock portfolio is Lycopodium (LYL) and I'm very happy with that choice.

In the new financial year, so in a couple of weeks, I plan to deploy a significant amount of the cash produced by that (very recent) larger portfolio liquidation back into the market via direct investment in ASX-listed companies, like LYL, GNG, XRF, EGL (although hopefully below 30 cps with EGL - I'd like them to pull back a bit), plus some larger (ASX300) companies like ARB, CDA and AD8 at lower levels if the opportunity arises, and a few other names, but for now, everything I've said here in terms of - I hold this company or that company in real money portfolios - you can completely disregard - I'm not going to go through and update straws and forum threads here for every company that I did hold and now no longer hold, but I'll update my disclosures as I add new content about specific companies. For now, and at least until July, I only hold 10 companies in real money portfolios, as mentioned above, and only 7 of those 10 are included in the 25 companies that you'll see tonight in my SM PF. But that will change in July.

Latest exits from my SM portfolio include MIN, DVP, WOW and SRG (DVP & SRG were sold today). MIN are in a strong downtrend with a few near-term headwinds, and I do like the company, but I would prefer to step aside until this downtrend ends and they go back into an uptrend - MIN tend to trend very nicely once they get going - in both directions. DVP have quite a few headwinds at this point, including the fact that some of their chosen commodities are not doing so well - namely lithium, zinc and nickel. Gold is going OK, but DVP is not a gold company despite working for a couple of them (as contract miners) and owning some undeveloped gold projects themselves. They are shaping up to be a similar style of company to MinRes (MIN), and I want to hold both, just not right now. WOW is OK here but I took a quick profit to rotate that money into something that looked to have even more near-term and mid-term upside IMO (GNG). Likewise SRG: good company, but I've taken profits (again) on SRG, this time to rotate those funds into more NST below $14, because they're going significantly higher over time, and I reckon I was underweight NST - they're the largest position in my SMSF but they were down a few spots here and I wanted to bring them back up a few spots.

With Swoop, I'm looking to probably load up a little more here in June and likely sell the lot in either July or August unless they really turn themselves around, so I'm in "salvage mode" with SWP - I doubt I'll be dabbling in Swoop any more in real life. The management experience is there but they haven't run THIS company nearly as well as they've run their previous companies. So in terms of management quality, they don't score particularly highly with me any longer. Way oversold, but I was saying that at 60 cents, 40 cents, 20 cents, and they closed today at 17 cents/share. Doesn't matter if I'm right and the market's wrong if the share price doesn't reflect that. More likely I'm just wrong about this particular company. There must be something that I just can't see. They've underperformed for sure, but 17 cps? Really??! I am tempted to put some real money into them below 20c just to make a quick profit in July or August but I probably will try to stay disciplined and stick to the quality companies that make me smile when I look at them instead of frown.

But, as far as what I hold IRL, yeah, nah, not much right now.

I didn't realise so many people were using this for a similar reason to me, I thought more would just straight up replicate what they were actually holding.

My peronal pf is around 30% large-cap stocks for longer-term stability (just to make me a little more comfortable), usually around 10x 1% 'research' positions that I move around with a lot, and I would say around 10% that I hold in various things if I think an industry-wide trade is on, or if some small-cap I have been following for a while looks like it might get rammed by brokers for a bit etc. The remaining 50%-odd is the capital that I see as really working for me and where I am actively trying to outperform the market.

Essentially I wanted to use Strawman to replicate this 'middle' 40-50% with nothing to re-weight against to see what would happen if I concentrated like hell into my top 10 or so ideas and was a little slower to take some profits. The results of actually trialling something like this has had a significant impact on the way that I think about position sizing and taking profits within my personal portfolio. It has also a massive boost to my confidence in my own ability to recognise the kind of opportunities that I'm after IRL. 

+1 upvote to Strawman as a fantastic tool :)

My real life portfolio is a fair bit different to my Strawman. Partly because a bunch of stuff I hold in real life is not very interesting, and partly because I'm using Strawman as a proving ground for some companies / strategies I'm not sufficiently confident in to throw real money at.

Sadly my Strawman has well outperformed my real portfolio since the beginning of August when I joined.

If anyone is interested, my real portfolio contains (in order from largest to smallest share-equivalent exposure):

Z1P, BHP, MND, VML, ANZ, COL, VGB, IVZ, BGA, IXR, GNX, GOR, ELD, ALQ, A2M, ALC, RSG, SEMI, 3DP, ANN, EXR, LRS

In constrast, Strawman contains:

Z1P, BHP, ANZ, GNX, IVZ, COL, GOR, TNT, SEMI, ALC, IXR, LRS, VML, 3DP

So lots of overlap, and most stuff I hold on Strawman I also hold in reality. I currently don't hold TNT for real, and I've taken profits more aggressively in Strawman which has meant my VML holding is much smaller. But other than that, just some boring stuff like VGB, MND, BGA, ELD, ALQ, ANN is missing from Strawman.

You bring up a very relevant point FiredUp - liquidity issues.

Some small cap and micro cap shares are very illiquid, some not trading every day. Therefore in real portfolios you need to size your purchases accordingly. In those more illiquid stocks you will see Bot activity effectively buying and selling as little as 1 share at a time. Thus its not a game any retail investor can play (retail investors most times can't put in an order to buy a share if the order value is less than $500), ie its not a level playing field at all (I do wonder if the ASX will cop a class action at some point in time because of this unequal treatment by the ASX).