LM portfolio as at 27/06/2025:
| Code | Sector | Date Bought | Cost | Value | Gain/Loss |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| LM055 LM055-2 LM055-3 |
General Financial | 11/01/2023 02/05/2023 20/12/2023 |
£3850 | £8760 | 127.70% |
| LM079 LM079-2 LM079-3 |
No specific Industry | 22/02/2024 16/10/2024 03/12/2024 |
£4310 | £5000 | 16.17% |
| LM084 | Food Producers | 21/10/2024 | £1520 | £1570 | 2.99% |
| LM086 LM086-2 |
Banks | 02/12/2024 10/02/2025 |
£3040 | £3580 | 17.68% |
| LM087 | Fixed Line Telecommunications | 02/12/2024 | £1520 | £1800 | 18.73% |
| LM089 | Investment Services | 06/01/2025 | £1530 | £1610 | 5.70% |
| LM090 LM090-2 |
Aerospace & Defense | 06/01/2025 23/04/2025 |
£3040 | £4210 | 38.45% |
The house is now officially up for sale and I will keep you informed of any new developments.
A nice man from the estate agent came round with his special cameras and tooks lots of photos which managed to hide much of the (admittedly easily-fixed) cosmetic issues.
The Rightmove ad looks so good I want to buy the house myself.
Friends with more experience in buying and selling houses have warned us that it will probably sell very quickly but the issue is that we do not have anywhere to move to. There's very little to buy in our area with the budget we have. There are lots of roads filled with semi-detached houses but not as many detached houses. So when they do come up, they tend to sell quite quickly.
We'll see, I guess. The listing has only been up for 24 hours and we don't yet have a sign in the garden so it's very early days. Exciting though.
The World Wide Web
This last week at work saw me trying to solve what seemed like an impossible task on some new software that I've had forced on me at work. I've got to use this software to replace something the company has been using for over 7 years. I've been back and forth with the software support team and after wasting my time for two weeks down a rabbit-hole, support finally got on the same page as me and pointed me in a different direction.
Part of my process for dealing with problems like this is to give myself, say, an hour to work on it and then at the end of that time I switch off and do something else for half an hour. Then I spend another full hour on the issue before taking half an hour off and so on, repeating it through the day.
On the whole the half hour usually consists of messing around on the web, the internet, the "information highway". I quite enjoy looking up websites that I used to frequent years ago.
Sadly many of them are gone, or what often happens is that I go to the old domain and find a completely different site there. There used to be lots and lots of really good finance-related blogs with interesting articles posted frequently. Some still exist but the content has changed remarkably - for example it appears thesimpledollar.com has been purchased and turned into a consumer site along the lines of Money Supermarket, where the visitor doesn't read interesting blog posts anymore but searches for the best loan rates or credit cards.
This is obviously where the real money is. Why bother writing articles - or rather paying people to write articles - when you can just buy a popular site that is well-ranked in the search engines and turn it into a comparison site?
It gets sadder though. Most sites I can remember are long gone with the domains either not resolving anymore or there is just a parking page where the site used to be. In this case I use archive.org to have a good look at what used to be there.
At least a lot of it has been captured by the Wayback Machine so that it's possible to reminisce. Going forward I imagine there will be far more lost in the passage of time.
Nowadays most content is posted in locations that aren't captured or are temporary. Imagine how much has been written over the years on Facebook and other social media sites. People have poured their hearts onto someone else's website and it can be deleted in a heartbeat. Or the account is hacked and all the content lost.
How many times have you tried to follow a link from a forum or Reddit or website and got a 404 error? Or Youtube links that don't result in a video because the channel no longer exists or the user decided to make the video private? So frustrating.
I'm proud to say that I've still got websites up from over two decades ago, unchanged for people to view. Not that anyone does with the state of Google's search results. And don't even start me on the cost of domain renewals...
Portfolio
New portfolio high this week following Friday's close - withdrawal adjusted, of course.
I wish there was more to add but all the current positions are doing really well and I don't have enough spare cash in the LISA to buy anything else.
This means I'm just logging in regularly, usually once a day, to make sure there hasn't been any massive crash in any of my shares and waiting for a signal to do something else.
Hopefully I'll have some money to add later this year and then I can add some positions.
Good news from the new job - they are paying employer contributions into my SIPP so I'll be able to start buying shares in that account soon. Add that to my 5 other pensions and I should be minted in retirement!