How to Run the Retirement Portfolio from Anywhere in the World

A few people have asked me to publish the exact ETFs I use in the portfolio. I understand the request, a strategy is not much use if nobody can work out how to implement it. The difficulty is deciding how much to give away. The funds themselves are not secret and I am not using anything exotic. The portfolio is built from ordinary vanilla ETFs covering equities, bonds, gold, commodities and cash, but the exact list is still part of the secret sauce!

I have spent a lot of time deciding which markets belong in the system, which funds are suitable, how to deal with short ETF histories and which alternatives are close enough when the preferred fund is not available. That last point matters because this is not really a UK-only strategy. I run it from the UK, so naturally I use funds available through UK platforms but someone in the US could run the same system using US-listed ETFs, someone in Europe could also run it using suitable UCITS ETFs available to them. They do not have to use exactly the same ticker, but I do provide the best alternative ticker for a US implementation if available. The important thing though is that the fund performs broadly the same role within the portfolio. This matters for investors using restricted accounts too. Some US 401(k) plans, for example, offer only a limited menu of funds. In those cases, the important thing is not matching my ticker exactly, but identifying the closest available fund that provides the required underlying exposure.

Paid subscribers will still receive the relevant UK and US ETF tickers with the monthly signals. The point is simply that investors using other markets, brokers or restricted accounts may need to identify the closest equivalent available to them. A US ticker may be unavailable to a British investor. A European ETF may have one ticker in London, another in Frankfurt and another in Amsterdam. Sometimes the ticker changes while the fund and ISIN remain the same. There can also be several funds that appear to cover the same market but are not quite identical. One may include emerging markets. Another may not. One bond ETF may own short-dated government debt. Another may have much more sensitivity to interest rates. Two commodity funds may follow different indices and produce noticeably different returns. Most investors do not need to obsess over every small difference. I certainly do not believe in endlessly changing funds to save another 0.02% in fees. But the fund does need to do the job it was selected to do.

What is in the portfolio?

At a broad level, the system looks across:

• Major equity markets

• Regional equities

• Smaller companies

• A small amount of long history themed ETFs

• Government bonds

• Gold

• Broad commodities

• Cash

The equity assets are there to drive returns; the defensive assets are there because equities are not always the best place to be, and bonds are not guaranteed to protect you in every difficult market. That was particularly obvious in 2022, when shares and bonds both fell together.

Gold, commodities and cash each behave differently. None is a perfect hedge, but together they give the system more than one possible response when the market environment turns against equities.

The portfolio does not hold everything at once. The system decides which assets qualify and which are currently strongest. These are not fixed portfolio weights. The exposures held at any particular time are determined by the system’s monthly signals, so the relevant asset classes — and their allocations — can change from one month to the next.

That decision-making process is far more important than the ticker symbols themselves.

What I publish

For paid subscribers, I provide the ETFs needed to implement the portfolio in both the UK and US.

The important thing is the underlying exposure rather than matching a particular ticker. Different countries, brokers and retirement accounts may offer different funds, and in some cases the exact ETF I use may simply not be available. Where that happens, the aim should be to find the closest suitable fund providing the same underlying exposure.

What I am unlikely to publish is the full production list together with every substitute, proxy and selection rule. That would come close to publishing the working system rather than simply explaining how to implement it. There has to be a reasonable line between transparency and giving away the entire methodology.

The watchlist is only one part

It is worth saying that even the complete ETF list would not tell somebody how to reproduce the portfolio.

They would still need to know:

• Which assets are compared with each other

• How they are ranked

• When the portfolio moves into defence

• How the defensive assets are selected

• When cash is used

• When the portfolio rebalances

A list of ingredients is not the same as the recipe. I want readers to understand what the portfolio is doing and why. I do not want it to feel mysterious or impossible to implement. At the same time, I do not think it makes sense to publish every detail of several years of research in one free post.

Paid subscribers receive the information needed to follow the live portfolio, including the current allocation and the UK and US implementation. I will also explain any changes that affect how the portfolio is implemented. The underlying selection rules and full research process remain proprietary.

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