That's right, I sold out of all the funds in my pension when the British government decided to start more money printing in late 2011. Enough was enough - share prices would go up for a bit, i'd get my money out, then i'd invest it as I saw fit (without paying someone 1.5% a year).
Having done a bit of research, I opened a Hargreaves Lansdown SIPP - it seemed to be the cheapest provider going for what i wanted, which is the ability to buy into very cheap tracker funds (i.e. those that mimic a certain index) and shares. The fees are pretty simple - a "platform fee" for certain types of tracker funds (between £12 and £24 per year i.e. what you'd be charged by a fund manager for between £800 and £1600 under management, although that doesn't include the tracker fee) - and a 0.5% fee per year on shares, which is capped at £200 per annum (i.e. it starts to decline as a percentage when the total value of shares held gets to over £40,000).
So what then? Time to start buying into some shares. My plan, so you know, is to publish the quarterly performance of my portfolio, and compare that to the FTSE index and how it would rank if I was a fund manager (which I am now, albeit a very small scale one!!!)
All fund managers have some kind of strategy when creating their portfolio. Mine is pretty simple - a focus on contrarian investing (i.e. buy when others are selling), dividend income (so shares anticipated to return more than 3% of their value per annum as dividends), exposure to as many markets as possible, and FINALLY - shares which my fiance agrees make sense to buy.
As at 16th January 2012 I have been buying into shares and funds for seven weeks. The first investment I made was a significant chunk of my total funds (11%ish) into a share that was backed with physical gold. That means that the shares represent gold held somewhere. Being a bit of a sentimentalist, I opted for gold held in vaults in Zurich, Switzerland - I can't think of anywhere better. So the share I went for is called ETF Securities Physical Swiss Gold . What does it do? As the site says:
"ETFS Physical Swiss Gold (SGBS) is designed to offer investors a simple, cost-efficient and secure way to access the precious metals market. SGBS is intended to provide investors with a return equivalent to movements in the gold spot price less fees."
Sounds good to me. And as you know, I am very into fees - for this one, 0.39% per annum (plus that 0.5% that HL charge me per year because it's a share). I am very worried about money printing, and gold is (as all the gold fans will tell you) unprintable by government. Plus it has been going up in value since Gordon Brown sold off most of the UK reserves in the late 90s from around $300 per ounce to $1800 today (i.e. a fivefold increase).
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