A true Saltydog performance

Posted on 27 May 2014 by Douglas Chadwick

Ken Turner a subscriber and Saltydog enthusiast wrote an article for the May newsletter. He described his delight at achieving a 47% increase on his ISA portfolio. This was a total return spread over the four years he had been managing his own investment using the Saltydog fund numbers. This performance has left his other IFA industry investments in the shade, just eating his dust. At first glance reading the article one just thinks that it is one hell of a good performance and well done him. Ponder a while on the numbers though and you realise that it is better even than that; he has produced an 11% annualised return which is far far from shabby and more to the point, if he continues in the same vein when he reaches seven years he will have doubled his original investment. Now that is something to shout about and he has done this in troubled times frequently using cash as his secure bolthole. Ken is not alone amongst our subscribers in achieving this sort of gain. This really begs the question as to why in this country we have (according to IMA statistics) accumulated £220 billion of cash ISAs. At the moment they do not even give a return to match inflation. They were created to be a tax free investment but if there is no gain there will not be tax to pay anyway, so why is there not more noise about this crazy situation? Perhaps it is in the interest of the financial industry for this to be the status quo. They take your money for cash ISAs and give you little or nothing back in the form of interest whilst investing it for gain to line their own pockets. Now there is a thought.