Edmond Chan blog

How did the David Swenson allocation do during the Covid-19 market tumult?

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Now I know that it’s not over yet and there’s big questions over the shape of the recovery post-Corona, but it’s worth a look at how the David Swenson allocation that I use performed during this crisis. 

There were some huge moves across almost all asset classes. At one point, the UK 100 index was down around 30% from its highs in Jan 2020. The idea behind diversified asset allocations such as Swenson’s is that you should be protected from the big moves like this. If you were 100% invested in equities, then you would track the 30% fall yourself. If you had a proportion of your portfolio in bonds, then in theory, you should see some insulation from this this 30% move because bonds are supposed to move roughly in the opposite direction. 

My asset allocation definitely didn’t see complete insulation. At the lowest point, my portfolio was down about 16%, with all of the bond assets in overall positive territory. So the diversification definitely protected me from the full impact of the drop in equities. 

As at 5th June 2020, my portfolio is around flat since inception around 2 years ago. (That might sound pretty naff but that does include regular monthly investment into a previously rising market, which would dampen overall returns) But to be flat and in slightly positive territory after such a crazy downward move in equities feels pretty good and gives me confidence in the Swenson allocation that it can weather seismic events.

Key learnings from Google Digital Garage’s free course: Fundamentals of Digital Marketing

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It’s a good time to be skilling up and there are loads of great courses out there online and many of them are free, and the ones that are paid aren’t that expensive (around £30 say – check out Udemy, Coursera etc).

Google Digital Garage has lots of free courses and the one that caught my eye was the only one that came with a certificate. Of course, that made it more attractive. That course was Fundamentals of Digital Marketing.

Review of Google Digital Garage's free course: Fundamentals of Digital Marketing

It’s listed at taking around 40 hours to complete and it has 26 modules. These encompass Search Engine Optimisation (SEO), Search Engine Marketing (SEM), Social Media, Local Advertising, Display Ads, Retargeting and Email Marketing. To get a certificate, you had to pass an exam at the end with 80% or more.

What did I like about the course?

It’s very well organised in terms of curriculum, and the videos were informative and clearly presented. Each module took around 40mins to finish and it was fun to get the dopamine hit when completing each one. It kept me coming back.

Mostly, I like the fact that I feel like I learned something!

Here’s an example of the video lessons:

Key learnings

It’s aimed at small business owners eg. hairdressers, bakeries, craft beer shops etc.

  • Have a clear Goal for your online marketing efforts
  • Have a mission statement and know your USP with crystal clear clarity
  • Start small and iteratively – you don’t need to spend lots on a digital marketing agency
  • Start with the basics – eg get listed locally
  • SEO – learn what gets you higher rankings in search engine results
  • SEM – learn how to pick longer-tail, less competitive keywords to target, and focus on the bid amount as well as the relevance of your ad to your business
  • Content marketing – focus on answering the questions that your customer really wants answered
  • Social media – focus on engaging with your customers to let them know more about your business and how you could improve your product or service
  • Use analytics to assess, test, and then improve your online marketing efforts. Get familiar with Google Analytics

What would I improve about the course?

I’d probably make it slightly harder to pass each module’s quiz, with more questions, tougher questions and reduced ability to go back immediately and change your answers until you got the right one.

Would I recommend it?

Yes definitely especially if you have no grounding in the topic, or it’s not part of your day job. It’s always good to add strings to your bow and this gives you a solid overview of the subject as well as giving you a certificate at the end.

I’d also recommend this course if you’re a small business owner. There’s lots of content in the course which shows how small business owners such as online cake makers use digital marketing to grow their businesses.

Check out Google Digital Garage here.

How Moneybox helped me painlessly save and invest £722.50 in 15 months

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This is a follow up to an earlier post I wrote called How you can save money effortlessly using Monzo, Marcus by Goldman Sachs, and Moneybox and an update to how the Moneybox part is doing.

How Moneybox helped me painlessly save and invest £722.50 in 15 months

Automatic equals painless

Ramit Sethi is all about having systems in place so that you don’t have to use your willpower. Because willpower is fickle and it gets exhausted and it doesn’t always work.

Systems on the other hand do work. Such as setting up automatic payments to come out of your account straight after pay day to go into your savings account or into your investment account. This way you don’t even think about it. This is how I’ve set up my Marcus savings account and my Hargreaves Lansdown ISA. It comes out of my account and automatically saves and invests for me. I don’t have to think about it and I don’t have to remember to manually make the transfer or the investment.

What is Moneybox?

Moneybox is a mobile app that I started using in February 2019 and it’s designed to make saving and investing super simple and painless. I use the iOS version.

How does Moneybox work?

In the Moneybox app, you connect your bank accounts that you spend money with eg. Monzo or HSBC as I use. You decide to round up transactions to the nearest pound or two pounds (as I’ve started to do). So let’s say you have a transaction for a coffee at £2.50. You could choose to round it up to the nearest pound (£3.00). Your Monzo account would show a £2.50 to the coffee shop, whilst the 50p round-up would be added to the Moneybox weekly pot. (50p might not sound like a lot but it all adds up. Like my mum used to say, watch the pennies, watch the pounds.)

Once a week the amount in the Moneybox weekly pot is taken from your chosen bank account (with which you’ve set up a direct debit). For me, it’s generally about £10 to £20 that’s built up over the week and this is swept from my HSBC account to Moneybox who then invest it in a Stocks and Shares ISA according to your chosen risk appetite in a simple mix of funds.

(The choice of mix of funds is Cautious, Balanced, and Adventurous, where Cautious has the least equity funds and more bond funds, and Adventurous has the highest allocation of equity funds. Mine is in the Balanced mix, which is 65% global equities, 10% global property shares and 25% corporate bonds.)

You can also ‘boost’ your savings with Moneybox through one-off injections of £10, £20 etc. The app shows you how that can positively impact your total savings and investments over a longer time horizon.

How much have I saved and invested through the app?

As of today (26th May 2020), I’ve got a grand total of £722.50 in the ‘balanced’ mix of funds. I’m chuffed to bits with that because it was easy. I didn’t even have to think about it. It was almost literally made up of the loose change in my pocket.

What’s been my return on my investment?

As at 26th May 2020, £1.50! That’s 0.21%! Not great I know 🙂 but remember we have just had a big correction in equity markets due to the Coronavirus pandemic, and we’re in this for the longer term. It was a negative return for a while during March and April 2020.

Would I recommend Moneybox?

Absolutely! It’s genuinely painless. I don’t even think about it anymore. The app is easy to use and the act of ’rounding up’ and ‘boosting’ your weekly pot is fun and almost delightful. It’s a well-designed app.

If you struggle with saving and investing, if maybe you don’t have the discipline to manually save and invest each month or just regularly, then this type of app/system could be what you’re looking for.

Check out Moneybox here!

The Happiest Refugee by Anh Do

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Angelique gave this book to me in May 2014 and it’s taken a lockdown in 2020 for me to read. Sorry Babe!

Anh Do is a famous artist and comedian in Australia and he tells his story of how he and his family escaped post-war Vietnam by boat and eventually settling in Australia. Anh and his brother were infants at the time of the crossing. The section on the family’s journey by small fishing craft is harrowing. They encounter pirates who take everything they have, lose family members overboard until they’re rescued by Germans.

When they arrive in Australia, the adult members of the family are amazed by the land of plenty, and are so grateful to “this great country”, where they can start a new life and where hard work is rewarded. Anh’s parents work all hours so that they can provide a better life for their 3 children. The boys are sent to a private school and Anh is very open and honest about how much he loved the school and his mates, but also at the same time never felt like he truly belonged as money was tough for the Do family. By this time, his father had left the family and his mother was a single parent.

Anh’s relationship with his father is complicated. On the one hand, his father is a larger than life character who led his family across the seas to Australia, and did daring feats of courage and bravery, and instilled a strong sense in his children that they could do anything, and that they should go for everything. But on the other hand, guilt drove him to drink and sadly violence towards his own family.

Ahn’s story of how he made it in comedy is inspiring, and his storytelling of important parts of his life is compelling. I particularly enjoyed the story of his engagement party, where Vietnamese met Aussies with a metre long pig!

He writes with raw honesty, and the book is filled with very personal stories. It was a pleasure to read and I recommend it to anyone who wants to learn more about Vietnamese boat people and growing up in 1990s Australia.

How can we make lockdown a more edifying experience?

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When I was at uni, I took an Aesthetics class. The Philosophy of Art. I don’t remember much from that course except for a couple of essays on Plato and Tolstoy.

Plato was keen that when educating the young men of his Republic that their art be censored and that the youth should only consume art that promoted nobility. So poetry shouldn’t be about loucheness and hedonism, rather they should be about promoting bravery in battle and moral uprightness.

I was reminded of this recently after binge-watching a series of Mindhunter on Netflix, a show about the FBI’s profiling of serial killers in the 1970s. This is show that goes deep into the minds and motivations of deeply disturbed people, and it’s very entertaining and very compelling. We watched this off the back of Unabomber, another Netflix show, this time about the hunt for another serial killer, Ted Kaczynski. Again very entertaining and compelling.

The question I had was: “is this type of show good for me? Is it making me a better human?”

You might say “lighten up mate, it’s just a show”.

But is it just a show? Say that you watch 2 of these series. That’s nearly 20 hours of dark subject matter. Are we really saying that this has no effect on your brain, on your neural pathways? By exposing yourself to the fetishes of psychopaths, is your own mind becoming corrupted or infected? What are you consuming to offset this? What positive, elevating content are you consuming to counteract this negativity?

Let’s look at what Plato might recommend for our viewing consumption.

Say you watch one hour of TV a day after work. Instead of Netflix, imagine that for one month you watched TED Talks. A TED Talk is around 15 mins, so that’s 4 TED Talks a day. That’s 120 TED Talks a month. How much more elevated do you think you’d be on this diet as opposed to on just consuming Netflix?

We can do the same with our other channels of consumption. Take Instagram. If you wanted to lose weight, replace the photos of burgers and huge pizzas with buddha bowls and salads. Make your feed one that is congruent with your overall goals.

Who knows how long we’re going to be in lockdown for? But we could make the best use of it possible. Instead of bingeing Narcos, then Narcos Mexico, maybe we could watch Roma, an Oscar-winning piece of world cinema? Instead of being glued to the news, we could listen to long pieces of the greatest classical music.

One of my best mates who’s currently in lockdown in Rome asked his parents for some musical inspiration to listen to during the Easter weekend. They came back with Handel’s Messiah and Bach’s St John Passion. We listened to the Messiah on full whack yesterday, which was elevating, and reminded me of a goal I’ve had for years after reading an interview with Emmanuelle Beart who blared out classical music in her country house during the interview (maybe that story doesn’t travel well!).

During this lockdown, we can read the great books we’ve put off, or listen to the full Ring Cycle (18 hours), or watch the greatest films in the world, do 1,000 pressups, take virtual tours of the world’s greatest galleries (like the Rijksmuseum) and museums online and using mobile phone apps. Do things and consume things that elevate and edify.

Right off to listen to the St John Passion. Why don’t you join me?!