Thanks Adam for your insight and approach. There is so damn much to pay attention to over such a wide range of potential positions and so many ways of analyzing that I tend to get into a bit of "paralyses by analysis." No matter which potential position I look at and test there seem to be good possible positions and others that make no sense at all. Plus, I really need to look at almost all the data behind the position to avoid getting blind sided. I know once I clean up the mess and chose reasonable positions to stick with for the longer haul it will be less time consuming but it takes time to get there. Bowler Bob's comments about what type of investor you are, "I believe, and act upon, the idea that a person needs to know what kind of investor they are, and act within those "boundaries" is critically important, I just haven't figured it out yet, alas.
Newport seems to help but can be time consuming for analyzing potential positions given I'm running it on W7 and not in a virtual machine where at least the process is a bit faster. The various spreadsheets have a similar problem but are a bit more transparent about what is happening and why.
It seems that Hing's Automatic Investor is a bit easier given it auto loads data but his 10 day trial is too short for real testing. What does everyone think of it, overall? The price is not all that much but it seems that he has not done all that much to update it in recent times.
I find some of the labels confusingly named and have struggled with that while getting other things done that need attending to, so any feedback is most welcome.
As to the trusts, I am making progress in getting out of some of the worst positions with tiny gains and building cash reserves for future positions. This will allow me to diversify better but the market is so volatile, up one day, down the next, it has been a bit of a pain.
Thanks to all of you for your help,
Allen
