Dominic Thomas
Feb 2019  •  5 min read

How to read your valuation statement

If you have an investment, you will receive a valuation every 3 months, on a quarterly basis. These tend to be issued to the 5th of January, April, July, and October in-line with the tax year end. Your statement will show various items, the elements that I want you to focus on understanding are the fund, the units and the price.

The Fund ABC

The Fund. You will see the names of funds, these start with the name of the investment company and then followed by the name of the fund itself. This tells you where and probably what the fund is investing. By way of example. I will consider the Dimensional UK Smaller Companies Inc Fund.

A – The Investment Group

The first bit of any fund name is the name of the investment group, this may sound obvious, but as many names are unfamiliar or get altered due to mergers it is important to state the obvious. In my example, “Dimensional” is the name of the investment company.

B – The Sector

In my example, this fund is invested into UK Smaller companies, a specific sector of the UK stockmarket. This is investing in shares in companies in the UK that are deemed “small” which really means not the top 350 biggest companies in the UK. It does not mean a little local business.

C – The Unit Type

Most funds also show “Inc” or “Acc” at the end, this reveals if the fund is paying out any income (dividends) – hence “Inc”. Alternatively, “Acc” (accumulation units) whether they are automatically re-invested within the fund. Generally speaking we use “income” funds because this makes life easier for everyone to track income for capital gains calculations. The income can be re-invested within your portfolio or paid out to you, the investor. This varies depending on the product type and strategy required.

Unique Identifier

Every fund has its own reference number, to make life deliberately complicated there are several different unique numbers for a fund “SEDOL” or “ISIN” are perhaps the most well used. This is nothing more than a way of locating the specific fund. All funds now have their own summary fact sheet, now called a Key Information Investor Document or KIID. How the financial world loves its acronyms.

Where and what the fund is invested into is a deliberate selection, designed to form part of your overall portfolio. The fund itself may be thought of as “high risk” (or “low risk”) but as part of a larger portfolio is designed to provide a combined risk for the entire portfolio.

Units

On your statement you will probably then see the number of units. Think of this the quantity of your holding in the fund, which can run to several decimal places. This is what you hold, or what you have bought – units in the fund. These amounts will therefore only alter if you have added more money (bought more units). They might reduce for the opposite reason – you have withdrawn money or units were sold to pay charges.

Price

Typically, the next column will be the price of the units on a specific day. Please note that the price changes each day and reflects the end of day value of all of the holdings within the fund. So in our example of the UK Smaller Companies Fund, this would be the value of all the equities (shares) held in UK Smaller companies at the end of the day. These are listed on global stockmarkets.

Value (or valuation)

This is typically the next column and is the sum of the number of units that you own in a fund, multiplied by the value.

Dimensional UK Smaller Companies Inc 46.694 units at £28.38 per unit is worth £1,325.18. In short: 46.694 x £28.38 = £1,325.18.

Your valuation is therefore a snapshot of the value of your funds on a specific day. It has happened, today’s value will be different. Having quarterly valuations really means that you have 4 days in the year of information.

Think Twice

When you look at your statement you may well compare it against a previous one. You might see changes in the funds held (if we have advised any) or changes in the units – even if no new money has gone in (due to a rebalance or re-invested income). You may observe that some of the values have fallen or risen. This reflects the fund and the market at the time.

It is tempting to think that funds that are worth less must be doing badly. This is not necessarily the case, in fact its highly unlikely to be true. It is merely the current value, not a reflection on the fund, which is selected specifically for its cost, reliability and the way it combines with your other holdings. Think of each fund as a parts of a car, you don’t have all engine or only tyres, it is put together deliberately to produce a longer term overall performance, designed with decades in mind, not days or quarters. In practice the different bits are asset classes – types of liquid investments that can be priced reliably on regulated global markets.