I’ve no ‘king idea what we are doing up here mate…

A great quote from Jimmy at FinanceRomance from a market maker looking back at the ramp up over the last year and getting the jitters about the lack of substance behind the market rally, from the May 10 line or earlier. His jitteriness was prescient, well on the one-month timescale, anyway.

He was right to be worried 😉

Round about the same time, back in May, an Ermine was surveying his eyrie, thinking to himself “really need to do something with this year’s ISA allowance”. Although it will push me over the FSCS guarantee I’ve decided that the Retail Distribution Review has made everything so unclear I will eat the risk and stick with TD for another year.

There was still the problem, however. I was unable to see any good reason why we are up here, either. Let’s face it, the Euro fiasco is still lurking under the water and has got to blow some time, the fundamentals if anything are getting worse as the rot metastasizes and begins to eat at the core. If someone were to take bets that in five years Greece would return to the military dictatorship where it was in my schooldays I’d consider putting some money on it, and switching off the TV station has a kind of cold-war symbolism, like the last broadcast at the start of this clip from Hungary that chilled my grandparents in 1956 as they listened from neighbouring Germany:

There are six levels of crap going down in Syria that is killing shedloads of people,  threaten a new cold war, threaten the oil supply and for some reason we appear to be choosing some unusual bedfellows over there. Please, no more foreign wars until somebody works out how to win the peace…

It’s a puzzle to me exactly why there’s been such a party in the markets. The trouble with the ISA allowance is it’s a use it or lose it. But I couldn’t really find much worth buying. Though it was a dearly hard-won piece of learning, I have learned don’t chase momentum…

Then I lit on the section on TD which had Bed and ISA forms, and figured I still have some unfinished business with Sharesave. I sold 10k of Sharesave shares last year, both to thin out CGT liabilities and to diversify the holding into something else. Though holding a shedload of shares in one’s ex-employer is a lot better than holding a shedload of shares in one’s current employer it’s still bad news from a sector diversification POV to hold 40% of my portfolio all on one firm. So goodbye some of The Firm and hello Vanguard Dev World ex-UK – for the simple reason than my HYP is UK and I need to get out more…

The nice thing about bed-and ISA-ing is that with TD I save one lot of dealing fees, though I still eat a hit of ~ £100 on the turn. It looks like the anonymous trader has got his view heard, and the market is turning south, so I may have jumped the gun. However, at least I don’t have to worry about the CGT, and since this year’s ISA didn’t actually cost me anything I guess I can use the regular account to buy if the correction turns into a rout. Would it be too greedy to want the FTSE down by the 5500 mark sometime this year? It was lower in the 2011 Summer of Rage but I hope that sort of thing won’t happen again. Well, a noticeable summer wouldn’t be bad, but not the rioting for desirable consumer goods.