LM portfolio as at 15/08/2025:
| 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 | £8380 | 117.88% |
| LM079 LM079-2 LM079-3 |
No specific Industry | 22/02/2024 16/10/2024 03/12/2024 |
£4310 | £5320 | 23.60% |
| LM086 LM086-2 |
Banks | 02/12/2024 10/02/2025 |
£3040 | £3950 | 29.67% |
| LM087 LM087-2 |
Fixed Line Telecommunications | 02/12/2024 22/07/2025 |
£3040 | £3560 | 17.25% |
| LM089 | Investment Services | 06/01/2025 | £1530 | £1720 | 12.72% |
| LM090 LM090-2 |
Aerospace & Defense | 06/01/2025 23/04/2025 |
£3040 | £4790 | 57.34% |
Wednesday night and I am all on my own; my wife is out having some drinks with a friend, the youngest is in bed and snoozing happily and the eldest is at her mum's house.
I'm piecing together an update which involves opening up the screenshot of my broker account from over the weekend then typing the current values of each share into a spreadsheet.
Once those values are in and checked to be accurate, I copy the HTML code that the spreadsheet automatically spits out and paste it into a new PHP file. That creates the table you see at the top of all these updates.
Funny story, I got the idea for the layout of the table from reading "How to Make Your Million on the Internet" (see link on homepage) and seeing how Jonathan Maitland reported his results. Sadly there is very little of his website available in the Wayback Machine. You can see for yourself:
(1) Go to archive.org
(2) Type in howtomakeyourmillion.com
(3) Scroll across to the results from the year 2000 and 2001.
Have a browse around the results and you'll see that there's little to find there. Archive.org can often be a treasure trove of websites that have been lost over time but in this case it's sadly lacking.
Doesn't help that one of the updates you can read mentions a website crash. Seems Jonathan didn't have decent backups of his website - understandable, it was the year 2000 and still very early days when it came to the information superhighway - and so one issue with the hosting of his site resulted in him losing dozens of updates.
There's a message there folks, make sure you backup regularly. And if you are daft enough to run a business on someone else's website (think Facebook, Instagram or any other inane social network site) I don't have the faintest clue how you would back that up. Not your site, not your property.
The webpage from 18th October 2000 says "This weekend poor old Jonathan saw his last six months work go up in smoke, thnaks to a technology fault: the site crashed, and everything that had been written on it disappeared into cyberspace, never to be seen again."
Worry not, friend, for I have multiple backups of this site. Restoring it after some hosting disaster should be reasonably straightforward. Although that's providing I am still around to do the restore. If not then this site will disappear like MILLIONS before it because nobody that I know in real life is aware that I run it (and the Wayback Machine hasn't archived it).
The Portfolio
Since last time I have made some slight changes to the LM Portolio.
Out went LM084, which was a small position in Premier Foods PLC (PFD) and lost just under £40. If I was strictly following my own rules then I really should've dumped this one back in March 2025 when it spent 5 days under its 200 day SMA but at that point I was a little distracted by my new job and so it survived for a little longer. In July it went under for three days running so I clicked Sell.
With the proceeds I added a new unit to LM087, which was quietly moving up along with the general UK market (the FTSE 100 made another all time high today).
Anyone who has read many of my updates on this site will certainly have noticed that there is very little trading going on. I don't swap and change the portfolio much at all and it did make me laugh when my broker sent me an email pointing out that if I did dozens of trades every month I would benefit from lower fees.
I checked the spreadsheet - I've done just 8 trades so far this year. And only 32 in 2024 and 46 in 2023.
I'm not a prolific trader, far from it.
In fact, check out the first position in the table at the top of this page: LM055. I haven't touched that one since the end of 2023 and it has steadily moved up in price the whole time. No shock falls, no huge jumps, it has quietly climbed in value over time and, barring any sudden disasters, will likely easily become the highest profit trade ever in this LISA Millionaire experiment.
Previously there was a trade which came close to making me a four figure profit - see LISAMillionaire.com Update Monday 27th June 2022 for more details but please don't dwell on my smugness about Bitcoin's fall in that post, it has sky-rocketed since I wrote that and serves me right.
Much as it is looking really good in the above table, LM055 won't rise forever and sooner rather than later I will get the nod to close it off. It isn't too far from its 200 day SMA at the moment and only needs a little fall to give the signal to sell.
Usually I would just sell the lot and reinvest in something else; compound the profit and look to plough the proceeds into something that is making new 52 week highs, putting one unit in at first then adding more once/if it starts to show some decent growth - exactly the same as what I have been trying to do for the past 8 years.
But... I've been thinking about whether it might be worth doing something a little different with this one.
As I see it I have a couple of choices:
(a) Sell the lot, clean it all out, take the profit and move on to something else.
(b) Sell enough shares of LM055 to reclaim the initial investment amount (£3,850) but keep the remainder
As of last Friday these shares were worth £8,380. Therefore selling enough to refund me the initial cost would leave around £4,500 worth of shares that I have technically got for "free". I could keep these in the portfolio and they wouldn't have any detrimental effect on my percentage of profit because following the "refund" I haven't actually spent anything to acquire them.
I would get the dividends paid to me twice a year and would also benefit from any further share price growth for years to come.
Alternatively the shares could drop drastically in value and in the back of my mind I would know that I could have cashed in and banked the profit in my portfolio, potentially putting it to better work elsewhere, instead of watching it disappear.
Doing a quick back-of-the-envelope calculation based on the dividends received over the past 12 months and the value of the shares earlier today, the shares I would still own after getting my initial investment back would earn around £85 per year in dividends.
Whilst that would likely rank as some of the easiest money I ever made, zero effort but consistent "passive income" potentially forever, it only amounts to less than 2% per year.
Yes the shares could continue to climb and make me a good return that way but there's no guarantee. And £4,500 is three units of investment in this fund. I could do a lot with that.
A business associate many years ago used to do something similar to this with technology shares. His method? Buy tech shares and then once they double sell enough to get your stake back. The only problem was that most of his shares didn't rise at all, let alone double. He ended up with a portfolio of shares worth a tiny percentage of what he paid for them. All he could do was check every so often and laugh at how ridiculous it all was.
Nah, when the time comes to liquidate LM055 I think I'll just take the money and run.