Battening down the hatches and exploring the opportunities of Brexit

Regardless of your views on Brexit’s ultimate desirability or not, it’s likely to bring choppy waters to the UK in the near future. You’ve heard quite enough of Remainers saying that, but the view is shared by some Brexiters. Take a random look at LeaveHQ’s contentAfter all, Britain is about to set up a new startup called UK PLC in the world, and we have good people like Liam Fox and Boris Johnson at the helm, what on earth could go wrong…?  In my youth the British elite seemed to be able to screen for competence and eliminate buffoons like BoJo and fops like Fox, but clearly this process has broken down. There’s nothing wrong with saying that Brexit is a tough job with notable risks, let’s spit on our hands and get to work to maximise the utility and minimise the costs. But that’s not what’s being done. The ruling party is a house divided, and so it doesn’t know what Brexit means. Other than Brexit, and I think we all got that over a year ago.

What we do know is that Brexit will be a point of change, the nature and type of change is uncertain, but in the short term will not be increased trade, the date is reasonably set though subject to late-stage fudging. There will be threats and opportunities to be had. It’s worth considering these ahead of time. I’ve already done an investing for Brexit post, but the inflation of the stock market since then makes the stock market more dangerous.

The boy scouts bit

It’s reasonable to expect shit to go down on the transition. There are some obvious things to do – stockpile water, bogroll, tins, dry carbs and motor fuel (outside the house and in approved fuel cans, people!). The Ermine is fortunate enough not to consume medication, but if you need this then having some advance supply would be wise, and do all this before Christmas, because the history of the world shows that if you are going to panic, then panic early or not at all.

I would hope Brexit would be a transient supply chain disturbance issue, but let’s face it, the government seems to be ill-prepared for some of the obvious interruptions to local trade. If you want to get more into this then UK Preppers are your friend. I’m not sure I want to live in their world for more than a couple of weeks…

Personal Finance – threats and opportunities

One of the great things about Brexit is that it is a planned and a local shitstorm. You don’t normally get advance warning about financial challenges, and nor do you usually get a massive store of assets that are definitely not involved with the crisis. Brexit isn’t going to threaten the world economy. The Brexiter Peter North was offering us a ten-year recession.

Britain is about to become a much more expensive pace to live. It will cause a spike in crime. […] Basically it will wipe out the cosseted lower middle class and remind them that they are just as dispensable as the rest of us.

The Ermine has already dealt with some of the threats, before the vote, by shifting into global assets and gold. There are other aspects of derisking:

I owe nobody any money, other than the credit card which is paid off each month. This is a big win in times of trouble, and I am probably not exposed to the jobs market¹

I have ramped down my allocation to equity markets over the last year, not to do with Brexit, but to do with overvaluation. Tragically that increases my exposure to Brexit induced devaluation.

I was going to draw my DB pension early, but I can’t think of anything I really want to invest in at the moment, so I run down cash, indirectly buying more annuity. Everyone else lucky enough to have a DB pension seems to be asking how much the CETV is. I wish I knew what asset class promising a good future income stream they were going to invest it in!²

I made several mistakes shortly after the vote, and several wins around it too, but overall I experienced a very significant numerical win from Brexit in my equity holdings. One of the problems now is that stocks are on very high valuations worldwide, buying equities anew is not so attractive. Monevator made a good move with the Brexit dividend, buying his flat with it, so he is less exposed to the overvalued stock market to the tune of one London flat³

the threats are more important to me than the gains

If Brexit is an economic success and I adopted a brace for impact position, then I look a bit stupid, but I get to live in a country that is doing well, though I’ve lost money on my ISA I have gained it in the future income stream of my pension. That’s a win as far as I am concerned, apart from the hurt to my pride in being wrong. I’ve had a lifetime of practice in being wrong, it’s no big deal. You Brexiters can have a jolly good laugh at my expense. I’m big enough to take the ribbing for my lack of faith in Bulldog Blighty.

If Brexit leads to a 10 year recession, that’s at least a third of my life blighted by that from now on, and my globalised ISA becomes a larger proportion of my future assets/income stream. Just to add spice to the mix, the stock market is at very high valuations. I hold two years worth of cash expenses because that’s how long I have to reach the age to draw my pension without penalty.

I hold most of last year’s ISA contribution in cash in my ISA, and may do the same with this year, because there may be opportunities in Brexit to buy UK assets cheaply in the turmoil. This is hard to execute because you never catch the low-water mark, so you buy stuff, then see it plunge 20% and have to be prepared to take the chance of buying similar assets and holding the trash you already have. While all the time you have this horrible screaming noise in your ears from the media telling you all is lost. What I need is for Monevator to do this again, at a suitable point, to stiffen the spine in April 2019. Let’s look on the bright side, it’ll be a new ISA year…

I already hold a lot of gold in ETF form. Rather foolishly I hold it in my ISA. In general you should hold gold outside an ISA, since it pays no dividend. Should the price appreciate to approach the capital gains limit, then sell the ETF and buy another gold etf. I hold SGLP, I could sell that and buy say PHGP at the same time, crystallise the capital gain but stay exposed to the same asset class. As long as there’s not a flash hike in the gold price in the 10 minutes between transactions I am OK. However, given it is in the ISA, the gold gives me some more working capital, if I have the balls to sell it and buy pounded-down UK stock indices.

Repositioning myself for Brexit

Cash and gold represent about 12% and 9% of my ISA. A lot of the shares part is sky-high, and fortunately a lot was bought before this time two years ago. The cash, however, is bad news, it’s GBP.

What can I do with it to get it out of the country?

1. Buy foreign currency
2. Spreadbet foreign currency
3. buy global government bonds
4. buy gold
5. buy world equities
6. buy world equities hedged to GBP

5 and 6 aren’t attractive, because I feel equities are overvalued now. I already hold a lot of VWRL and IGWD anyway. 4 isn’t that attractive either, because I hold a lot of gold ETFs from the first round of this Brexit aggravation in 2016.

1 and 2 are difficult for me because I want to do this in my ISA, the cash is already in the ISA. I could take it out and try and put it back in, unfortunately the Brexit date 29th March 2019 is very awkwardly close to the turn of the tax year (5th April), it’s possible that the financial system will seize up. It did after the original Brexit vote so it is likely to do so again⁴. They’re a possibility for next year’s ISA contribution, I guess.

For this year’s ISA, one obvious thing to do is to buy bonds. They are supposed to be the yin of the equity yang. Not so much corporate bonds, which seem to vary with equities these days. I’m already jumpy that the stock market is overvalued, so it’s government bonds I want. I know absolutely nothing about bonds, never been interested because my defined benefit pension has always been more fixed income than I would ever need for a notional 60:40 equities:bonds balanced portfolio for someone of my age and risk tolerance. There was an interesting thread on Monevator about bonds, but I am not sure I understand it well enough. The pointers seems to be to use currency hedged bond funds, which make great sense except for a guy who is explicitly looking for safety against the pound going down the toilet, I don’t want to hedge to the GBP. I read youngFIGuy’s piece on how he invests but it’s for the long term, and I am trynig to forestall a particular short term adversity. Here’s Lars Kroijer on Monevator taling about government bonds. He says:

If your base currency has government bonds of the highest credit quality (£, $, €) then those should be your choice as the minimal risk asset.

Err, no, Lars. With all due respect, not £. The last UK government took the piss having the referendum to alleviate a cat-fight in the Tory party. Not only did that shit on my future to feed tossers like Jacob Rees-Mogg, but the entire prosecution of the process of leaving the EU has been dominated by internecine fighting and precious little effective progress. I’d rather live in the UK than say Uganda, but I don’t view the £ as having the highest stability at all. So the last thing I want is UK government bonds for this particular job. That’s a no to YoungFiGuy’s VGOV, although that is fine for his purposes. Given that premise that UK government bonds may be risk-free in one way, but track the fail I am trying to hedge, Lars carries on

If your base currency does not offer minimal risk alternatives, you have the choice of lower-rated domestic bonds where you take a credit risk, or higher-rated foreign ones where you take a currency risk. Keep in mind that any domestic default would probably happen at the same time as other problems in your portfolio, and your domestic currency would probably devalue. That would render foreign currency denominated bonds worth more in local currency terms.

Exactly. in his next paragraph, it’s basically short-term foreign bonds i want. But looking at, say this US bond, I see shocking volatility.  And given it’s only a year, I am chuffed to discover currency ETFs – a class of thing I didn’t even know existed. Let’s take a look at SGBB

The ETFS Bearish GBP vs G10 Currency Basket (SGBB) is designed to provide investors with a short exposure to the British Pound relative to a basket of G10 currencies by tracking the Diversified GBP Short Basket Index (GBP) (TR) (the “Index”).

That’s about right, what did it do over the referendum?

Pretty much what you’d expect. It’s a bit dear, at 0.5% p.a, and of course I eat buy and sell costs plus the spread at iWeb. So I put it into iWeb to see how much it would cost and what the spread was, and couldn’t find it. I asked them on web chat if they offered it and it seemed to be frowned upon:

Thank you for waiting, it looks like the company may be a derivative and if that is the case we won’t be able to offer it. We will need to do some further checks for the company which can take up to 2 working days.

Blimey. Well that’s pissed on that idea then. I didn’t think ETFS securities was such a bunch of dodgy geezers, but it seems they are viewed with suspicion⁵. Hargreaves Lansdown do this one but disturbingly they say the ongoing charge is 1.24%. I suppose I could do it in my SIPP with them. I pay £24 on the turn, couldn’t work out if I get to pay the 0.5% Stamp duty on this.

Surely the market has priced Brexit in

and will do a great big meh on the day? I’m not sure the market has priced the stupendous incompetence that could be displayed, the danger of a no deal Brexit seems to be mounting. Some of the trend to no deal comes from the bad faith of the likes of Rees-Mogg and the shadowy European Research Group, the quality of whose thought is to be seen here. These are cakeists⁶, and I’m not personally convinced that Britain has such a compelling offer. Leo Varadkar has a point when he said

“We are two years telling people that it can’t be cherry-picking, it can’t be cake and eat it, so it [the white paper] needs to understand we are a union of 27 member states, 500 million people.

We have laws and rules and principles and they can’t be changed for any one country, even a country like Britain. Any relationship in the future between the EU and UK isn’t going to be one of absolute equals.”

The ERG hasn’t got that yet, to wit:

Which is why we are writing to reassure you of our continued, strong backing for the clear vision of an internationally-engaged, free-trading, global Britain which you laid out at Lancaster House.

That’s the internationally-engaged Britain that has just told the 450 million strong nearest trading partners to f*ck right off.  I’m not convinced a no deal Brexit is priced in by the market at all. I’m prepared to lose money if we do better than that and there’s a stonking rise in the £.

Obviously it may all be a grand game of chicken, but I’d say that the EU can do without the UK better than t’other way round, and it’s pretty obvious that there will be less UK trade with the EU when we are outside the EU than before. That’s fine, may be a price well worth paying to cut ourselves adrift from these moribund losers as some would see it. We don’t have to be members of the EU to trade with it, other countries seem to manage. But there does have to be some sort of agreement. At the moment it’s we want to have our cake and eat it, or we’ll walk away. Looks like walk away it is, then. That’s not in the price at all, IMO.

 

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1. probably is because at the moment my deferred DB pension is easily enough to live on, so my ISA holdings and residual SIPP give some buffer. But it is possible to imagine inflation and taxes rising so I struggle, in which case I am stuffed. I am not going to do engineering again after five years out of the field, I am not entrepreneurial by nature and I am too old. ↩
2. OK, I know the answer. The asset class is BTL residential property, FTW! ↩
3. He’s of course now exposed to a differently overvalued asset class, London property, but given it’s his first purchase and he wants to live in London, the utility value is high, and if it’s the Brexit dividend then it’s free money anyway… ↩
4. that could mean that for all this fine talk I will be unable to take advantage of any Brexit opportunities, squeezed out by all the shares selling going on in the market jamming retail websites. ↩
5. iWeb has since rung me up to confirm, this is considered a derivative and therefore not available to retail investors on their platform. It is news to be that not all listed shares are considered tradable. Need to sit down and think about this, because perhaps this red flag is there for a reason and ETFS really are dodgy geezers. ↩
6. they want to have their cake and eat it ↩