Portfolio Relevant – H.J.Scott & Co

30/03/202630/03/2026

War

But first a gentle reminder about the end of the tax year.

The end of the tax year is almost upon us, so as usual we are busy, busy, busy. If you need us to do anything for you before the year end, remember this is a short year as Easter takes some working days away from us. Once we get past the 6th April we will be topping up everyone’s ISAs who have General Accounts with us. If you don’t want this to happen, speak to Melissa urgently. The Cash in the General Accounts is waiting and we don’t want to miss one minute of the income tax and capital gains tax growth.

Don’t just do something. Sit there!

I mentioned how busy we are because this blog won’t be my usual long prose. Just some bullet points I’m afraid as time is tight.

I’m not a war correspondent. I have no military background. So I’m not qualified to make sense of the last month. I do know that so far I’ve only seen unbalanced and biased coverage based on the narrative the particular media organisation is pushing. The reporting is unhelpful to those of us who want the real story in order to make solid investment decisions. Details are sparse, we knew that the US and Israel had launched an attack at the same time our Prime Minister found out. The Government of the UK can no longer be trusted militarily – so much for the special relationship. Therefore anything the UK Government tells you isn’t new news. They probably read it on X (formerly Twitter).

08/02/202608/02/2026

Jekyll & Hyde

From ChatGPT:

“The premise of Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886) by Robert Louis Stevenson is a psychological and moral experiment taken to its catastrophic conclusion.

Dr. Henry Jekyll, a respected London physician, becomes obsessed with the idea that human beings are not unified personalities but composites of opposing forces — broadly, civilized virtue vs. primal impulse.

He develops a chemical serum designed to separate these elements, allowing each side to exist independently.

The experiment succeeds — but asymmetrically.

The moral, socially acceptable identity remains Jekyll. The uninhibited, amoral persona emerges as Edward Hyde.

Hyde is not merely less restrained; he is concentrated malevolence, physically smaller and vaguely deformed — a suggestion that evil is both regressive and evolutionarily primitive”.

Markets are Jekyll one day, Hyde the next.

The above introduction brings me neatly to today’s blog subject. The daily rapid gyrations of our investment portfolios that we are all currently experiencing. We manage somewhere between £106 million and £113 million, seemingly dependent on what day of the week it is. These daily extremes are un-typically poles apart – like Jekyll and Hyde. Two sides of the same coin. A battle unfolding not between good investors versus evil investors, but to a great extent those invested for long term steady reward, versus those who see the markets purely in the short term. Investors versus speculators. Those of us who pick and hold long term investment opportunities and themes, against those who gamble daily on a commodity or share price. Any commodity or share price. Rising or falling in the next day, hour, minute and even second. Typically your crypto-currency speculators. In then out quickly.

01/12/202501/12/2025

Thanksgiving

This is potentially a long read if you choose to read it all. If however you do not have any investments held within a General Account you can pass on a long technical section and fast forward to later in the blog. The jump link comes about a page lower from here.

I like the US holiday of Thanksgiving. The holiday is held on The fourth Thursday of November with the annual day set in stone by Congress in 1941.

Thanksgiving is day for US families to get together and enjoy eating too much turkey. Many watch a full programme of (American) football games with the extended family. A day to be grateful and celebrate being an American. This Thanksgiving finds us on a ship full of Americans and we too are celebrating alongside them for differing reasons. We are grateful that Wednesday’s UK budget wasn’t half as bad as expected. It wasn’t good for hard-working retired savers, but it could have been much, much worse.

It’s sad to think that if we in the UK tried to celebrate the history of our once great nation, on any particular day like Thanksgiving, half of the population would accuse us of being racist or colonialists. Why can we not be proud of our nation and culture like the Americans surely are?

We can afford to celebrate, particularly with the Americans, as the majority of our investment growth this year has come from harvesting the strong performance of US companies. Although the majority of Americans celebrate Thanksgiving, half of Americans are not thankful for the current political leadership in the US. This dis-satisfaction with our current government is also true on this side of the pond, for the majority of the UK population too. We both live in nations that are deeply split, but here in the UK we don’t have a national holiday to try to bring individuals together to resolve their differences. It’s a pity.

Anyway let’s talk about the real reason we in the UK are celebrating the day after Wednesday’s budget on Thanksgiving day. The tax rises announced weren’t as bad as we all feared. This blog was originally titled “The nightmare before Christmas”, perhaps I will save that for Torsten Bell’s first budget next year when he takes over the reins as the next Chancellor of the Exchequer.