A.I.M. Users Bulletin Board

[ls7550]

BTW, you used the Orcroft Method on both the buy and sell side in the spreadsheets you posted, right?

Correct. I tried a couple of different variations of applying ocroft and applied to both sequential buys and sequential sells.

Finding the right food for AIM is the trick to overall performance (or not). Many find it difficult to even match a index through selectivity so its a tough call. Part of the problems are costs and taxes and part is down to survivorship.

Take the "Dow" for instance. That started life as a Dow "Industrial" Average and there were also Dow Utility and Dow Transport average indexes as well. Of those three the Transport and Utility indexes lagged and over time the Industrial was expanded into being a more general index. A reasonable investment choice might have been to hold all three in equal measure, not realising the 20th century would have been kind to industrial expansion and as such the collective average of the three would have lagged the Dow Industrial average alone.

Much of investing is risk management - avoiding being too heavily concentrated into a single stock/sector that performs poorly. AIM will do the best it can with whatever you feed it and it has cash exhaustion measures to help avoid injecting too much into a single holding/AIM before calling it a day with that stock/sector. Its a good business manager but it can only manage what its given.