The wind has risen; we must try to live
Paul Valery, The Graveyard by the Sea
This is my ninety-seventh monthly portfolio update. I complete this regular update to check progress against my goal.
Portfolio goal
My objective is to maintain a portfolio of at least $3,000,000. This should be capable of producing an annual income from total portfolio returns of about $103,500 (in 2025 dollars).
This portfolio objective is based on an assumed safe withdrawal rate of 3.45 per cent.
A secondary focus will be maintaining the minimum equity target of $2,400,000.
Portfolio summary
| Vanguard Lifestrategy High Growth Fund | $930,271 |
| Vanguard Lifestrategy Growth Fund | $47,055 |
| Vanguard Lifestrategy Balanced Fund | $81,639 |
| Vanguard Diversified Bonds Fund | $91,293 |
| Vanguard Australian Shares ETF (VAS) | $570,410 |
| Vanguard International Shares ETF (VGS) | $834,689 |
| Betashares Australia 200 ETF (A200) | $330,508 |
| Telstra shares (TLS) | $2,110 |
| Insurance Australia Group shares (IAG) | $11,656 |
| NIB Holdings shares (NHF) | $6,948 |
| Gold ETF (GOLD.ASX) | $201,058 |
| Secured physical gold | $31,595 |
| Bitcoin | $1,857,719 |
| Raiz app (Aggressive portfolio) | $26,452 |
| Spaceship Voyager app (Index portfolio) | $4,540 |
| BrickX (P2P rental real estate) | $4,684 |
| Plenti Capital Note and Flex Market | $89,039 |
| Total portfolio value | $5,121,666 (+$300,142) |
Asset allocation
| Australian shares | 25.6% |
| Global shares | 24.8% |
| Emerging market shares | 1.0% |
| International small companies | 1.2% |
| Total international shares | 27.0% |
| Total shares | 52.6% (-27.4%) |
| Total property securities | 0.1% (+0.1%) |
| Australian bonds | 3.2% |
| International bonds | 3.3% |
| Total bonds | 6.4% (+1.4%) |
| Gold | 4.5% |
| Bitcoin | 36.3% |
| Gold and alternatives | 40.8% (+25.8%) |
Presented visually, the pie chart below is a high-level view of the current asset allocation of the portfolio.
Comments
This month the portfolio saw strong growth – of $300,000 – or 6.2 per cent.
This is the third largest monthly increase ever registered across the journey. The last 12 months has been the most significant period of expansion in the portfolio ever experienced.
The growth was substantially due to further increases in the value of Bitcoin holdings, which increased around 12 per cent across the month, combined with further gains in equities.
This has pushed the headline portfolio above $5.0 million for the first time in the journey.
At a headline level, the portfolio has therefore doubled since the end of 2022, again, largely due to the impact of Bitcoin. Looking just to the traditional financial portfolio, this has expanded by around 50 per cent over the same period, despite an absence of regular new investments across the last year.
Australian equity holdings provided gains of about 3.5 per cent in price terms, with distributions adding another 1.3 per cent to this. International shares also produced capital appreciation of 3.2 per cent, for a total monthly return of 3.7 per cent when distributions are accounted for.
Bond holdings produced a small capital gain of 0.2 per cent.
Gold continued its strong performance with an increase of just over 7 per cent for the month. Interestingly, this means that with the recent gold price increases, gold holdings are quite close to their target level of holdings. The value of gold holdings has doubled in nominal terms since mid-2019.
Continue reading “Monthly Portfolio Update – January 2025”