What Am I seeing on my Portfolio X-Ray on the portal?

Dominic Thomas
March 2026 • 3 min read

What Am I seeing on my Portfolio X-Ray on the portal?

One of the features of our secure portal is the ability to see the live valuations of your investments. These are not ‘held’ on our portal, it is merely a secure reporting tool, loaded with data pulled from the original sources (ie investment platforms, such as Fundment, Nucleus, 7IM, Transact and so on).

The portal pulls through current holdings and allocations, but doesn’t do a particularly good job of showing historic ones. You will see previous valuations, which reflect your actual valuations, but not of a fund that you didn’t have say three years ago but do today due to changes we may have made.

When you review this, you will see a combination of holdings and funds. You have a globally diversified portfolio of assets that are either shares in companies around the world or are a form of loan (debt) that a Government or company have issued. In the latter case (Bonds, Gilts and Cash) you lend your money to Governments and Companies on the agreement that they return it at a set date and in the meantime provide a fixed (agreed) level of interest. It’s more sophisticated than this implies, but essentially that’s what is happening underneath. So you hold lots (7,000-30,000) of securities within funds within your portfolio at a very low cost.

Your portfolio is based in part on your responses to loss (nobody likes it, but we all respond differently). In essence how much panic you feel. Unfortunately, whilst I would prefer emotions were removed from investing, they are a default setting on humans, so the attitude to risk questionnaire helps us assess how anxious you get seeing a large fall in value (or a small one). I am not a robot, but the world stock markets are not the place to develop your character. However, clearly part of good financial planning is to set an appropriate level of risk to generate returns that will beat inflation (and keep your spending power favourable) within the context of our conversations and what the money represents to and for you.

This is given more context by how long you are investing (for most clients it’s the remainder of their lifetime) and the level of average annualised returns that you need to achieve to provide the lifestyle and financial security that you require. These are obviously unique to you and your circumstances. The more held in shares the greater the long-term returns, but the greater the volatility (valuation wobbles).

Then there is possibly some short-term opinion on the state of the global economy or your need for cash (or both) which may also temporarily influence our selection.

The portfolio contents changed recently (to reduce costs and further increase diversification). So these funds are the current position not what you actually held three years ago. Secondly we may have taken some steps (with your agreement) to shore things up based on your short-term requirements for capital or income.

We use data and attempt to extract from this the evidence rationale for making decisions. The mix is appropriate and will include underperformers sometimes. You may remember me showing you an image that looks rather like a patchwork quilt of top performing assets or markets in each calendar year – a brightly coloured image. It’s very human to attempt to find patterns, but the pattern is that there is no pattern. Here is a recent one by Dimensional, you don’t need to worry about the small print on this, it’s the concept that is important. Ask me if you want a readable copy.

We combine assets to attempt to deliver a particular long-term return. Think of making something with flour, eggs, salt, sugar etc… different quantities and cooking methods provide anything from a pancake to a souffle (and a whole lot besides).

Not all elements will always ‘win’ or even be positive, but they add to the mix to deliver the required result. Think of it a bit like buying umbrellas for rain along with sunglasses and suntan lotion for sunshine. Markets are cyclical and random. In short we don’t look for the needle in the haystack, we buy the haystack.

Sorry for all the metaphors, but I think they work! To assess historic performance, you are better doing this in your platform portfolio (Fundment etc) or leaving it to us and do something less boring instead… (ok you have to be a certain age to get the Why Don’t You? Reference).

Does that make sense?

You may find this a helpful aid in thinking about your investments:

Solomon’s – Investing in Pictures

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What Am I seeing on my Portfolio X-Ray on the portal?Jemima Thomas2026-03-23T16:37:49+00:00

Are you building a bridge to your future?

Dominic Thomas
Jan 2026 • 2 min read

Are you building a bridge to your future?

Financial planning straddles the past, present and future. Here at Solomon’s, we like to start with the end in mind, the second habit of “highly effective people”. We need to know what you are aiming for and where you are now. It’s helpful, significantly so, to also know enough about the history that has lead to where you are presently.

One of the many problems with great financial planning is that it requires time and therefore patience. A combination that is not something that is easy to master and arguably the antithesis of our current cultural impulses; it’s also problematic because you only get the long-term once.

Compounding investment returns is a crucial part of your plan, in practice we are not magicians and really have three main ‘dials’ to operate – spending, contributing and time. So I wonder if you would consider the example of an actual bridge – the one that you have probably known about since early childhood nursery rhymes and probably crossed more than once … London Bridge. Construction of the first stone bridge started in 1176 and took around 33 years to complete; at the time it was the sole bridge across the Thames.

For hundreds of years, London Bridge was the only crossing of the River Thames. It had a total monopoly.

If you wanted to cross the bridge to get to the City, you paid a fee
If you wanted to sail under the bridge, you paid a fee
If you wanted to fish off the bridge (ill-advised in the Thames most of the time!), you paid a fee
If you owned one of the 140 shops/houses on the bridge, you paid a fee

Since opening in 1209, those payments have been accumulating and administered by Bridge House Estates (now called City Bridge Foundation). To give a sense of scale, the 816 years of being open for business until 2025 is obviously a very long time indeed.

To give you a sense of what compounding can do, if you’d invested the princely sum of £100 in 1209 and made a 3% return every year for the last 816 years, you’d have £2,986,588,300,073 today.

Today, now a charity doing all sorts of work and also the owner of Blackfriars Bridge (1769), Southwark Bridge (1819), Tower Bridge (1894) and the most recent Millennium Bridge (2000), the Foundation has annual income of over £42m a year, of which around £10m is from admissions and visits. The latest accounts report assets worth over £1.6bn. This gives rather a lot of meaning to terms like “spanning the generations” and is some serious legacy planning! Imagine the wealth of history that the bridge has witnessed – albeit rebuilt several times.

References:

Report and Accounts: https://www.citybridgefoundation.org.uk/about/governance/annual-reviews-and-reports

Charity: https://register-of-charities.charitycommission.gov.uk/en/charity-search/-/charity-details/1035628/assets-and-liabilities?_uk_gov_ccew_onereg_charitydetails_web_portlet_CharityDetailsPortlet_organisationNumber=1035628

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Are you building a bridge to your future?Jemima Thomas2026-03-24T16:26:11+00:00

If your portfolio was your house

Dominic Thomas
April 2025 • 2 min read

If your portfolio was your house…

As you come across news stories about sudden market falls, (I doubt you have read one about a sudden market increase, unless it’s designed to prompt feelings of envy), I wonder if thinking of them is better if you consider it in the context of your home.

“HOUSE PRICES AT LOWEST POINT IN 5 YEARS”

If you read the headline above, you may be a bit miffed, but you are unlikely to change your plans. You almost certainly don’t ‘panic sell’ your home worried that the value may fall further. Panic selling a property is also generally pretty difficult, even with the most attentive broker, conveyancer, lender and buyer, it’s unlikely that the process will complete within three months, certainly not the next day. This process, whilst decidedly unhelpful to people buying and selling, does help reduce the impact of panic.

If there is a property crash, generally you sit it out, waiting for things to improve. A few people may be caught out, those in the middle of a sale or who have to move for various reasons – it is these people who are most likely to suffer the pain of a downturn.

Similarly, your portfolio is set up to provide a lifetime of income and capital. It is anticipated that the value will vary each day. Unlike your home, share prices are based on corporate results, track records and expectations for their trade in the near future. Your home is valued based on similar properties in the area; what you think it’s worth and what someone else is prepared to pay are often very different.

In short, your financial plan is designed for you, stretching out over the years to come. Yes; we don’t know how bad things will be in the short term, or indeed how quick or how full the eventual recovery will be, but it will happen.

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If your portfolio was your houseJemima Thomas2025-04-27T19:24:52+01:00

Please Fasten Your Seatbelts

Dominic Thomas
April 2025 • 2 min read

Sit Tight

What the global markets are currently experiencing is not new. It is only different in the sense that it’s utterly pointless and caused by one particular individual. That in itself suggests that ‘the system’ is very flawed and if I could change it I would – but I can’t and neither can you.

Our regulator would want you to know that a 10% fall has happened – it hasn’t yet, but frankly by the time you read this, it may have done. Knowing that doesn’t help. In fact, I would argue that you are better off switching off the news and social media and not looking at your portfolio at all. It’s not good for your mental health or any sense of wellbeing.

Your financial plan is designed for the long-term – the rest of your life. It is not designed for the next year, but for every year. We believe, because of the wealth of evidence from history, that markets rise and fall very suddenly, often for poor or misguided reasons. However, they always recover, given enough time (which is key). I do not like seeing the valuation of funds drop any more than you do – I can assure you. In fact, I am pretty certain I’m far more fed up with it, as it is so needless.

“Sit tight” is very easy for me to say, but it’s very hard to do, I know that. However, we have been through similar events before, lots of them. It’s never comfortable and often feels like “this time it’s different”. It is certainly different having an idiot as a President, but there are lots of similarly foolish and vile men (and some women) running countries around the world. It’s part of our lives and something we each contend with. Yes; Trump is unpredictable (other than in his capacity to lie) but even so, there is a limit to his real power. You are invested in companies around the world, many of them trade with each other and are interconnected, something that Trump will never understand. No economy is an island of penguins.

Yes, this is concerning, anyone who has invested in the last month has taken a hit on value, but it will recover. You still own and hold the same ‘stuff’, it’s just that the perceived value is lower than it was at the start of January. Attempting to ‘time the market’ is only ever easy in hindsight and requires at least two decisions, to exit and to re-enter. Neither are easy and from experience most fail to get even close (and if they do, to be honest it’s nothing more than luck as they can never repeat their achievement).

Your portfolio is global, hugely diversified and very low cost. Values will rise again once we have got through this period of self-inflicted insanity. Sadly, I have nothing good to say about the current President of the United States, or his cabinet and supporters. To me they look, speak, sound and smell very much like a fascist dictatorship, certainly it shows all the signs and actions of one in its infancy. I can only hope that his premiership and his regime ends very suddenly before the allotted time. He has no sense of decency and no understanding of history. The sooner he is gone the better.

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Please Fasten Your SeatbeltsJemima Thomas2026-03-24T16:31:09+00:00

Why long term investing is crucial

TODAY’S BLOG

I came across this article by David Booth, the founder of Dimensional Fund Advisors in the US and I think it fair to say, one of the giants within the investment community. I think he has found a great way of outlining the problem of uncertainty. Whilst the references are American, this doesn’t detract from the message.

WORRIED ABOUT STOCKS? WHY LONG-TERM INVESTING IS CRUCIAL…

We are living in a time of extreme uncertainty and the anxiety that comes along with it. Against the backdrop of war, humanitarian crisis, and economic hardship, it’s natural to wonder what effect these world events will have on our long-term investment performance.

While these challenges certainly warrant our attention and deep concern, they don’t have to be a reason to panic about markets when you’re focused on long-term investing.

Imagine it’s 25 years ago, 1997:

J.K. Rowling just published the first Harry Potter book.
General Motors is releasing the EV1, an electric car with a range of 60 miles.
The internet is in its infancy, Y2K looms, and everyone is worried about the Russian financial crisis.

A stranger offers to tell you what’s going to happen over the course of the next 25 years. Here’s the big question: Would you invest in the stock market knowing the following events were going to happen? And could you stay invested?

Asian contagion
Russian default
Tech collapse
9/11
Stocks’ “lost decade”
Great Recession
Global pandemic
Second Russian default

With everything I just mentioned, what would you have done? Gotten into the market? Gotten out? Increased your equity holdings? Decreased them?

Well, let’s look at what happened.

From January of 1997 to December of 2021, the US stock market returned, on average, 9.8% a year.

A dollar invested at the beginning of the period would be worth about $10.25 at the end of the period.

These returns are very much in line with what returns have been over the history of the stock market. How can that be? The market is doing its job. It’s science.

Investing in markets is uncertain. The role of markets is to price in that uncertainty. There were a lot of negative surprises over the past 25 years, but there were a lot of positive ones as well. The net result was a stock market return that seems very reasonable, even generous. It’s a tribute to human ingenuity that when negative forces pop up, people and companies respond and mobilize to get things back on track.

Human ingenuity created incredible innovations over the past 25 years. Plenty of things went wrong, but plenty of things went right. There’s always opportunity out there. Think about how different life is from the way it was in 1997: the way we work, the way we communicate, the way we live. For example, the gross domestic product of the US in 1997 was $8.6 trillion and grew to $23 trillion in 2021.

I am an eternal optimist, because I believe in people. I have an unshakable faith in human beings’ ability to deal with tough times. In 1997, few would have forecast a nearly 10% average return for the stock market. But that remarkable return was available to anyone who could open an investment account, buy a broad-market portfolio, and let the market do its job.

Investing in the stock market is always uncertain. Uncertainty never goes away. If it did, there wouldn’t be a stock market. It’s because of uncertainty that we have a positive premium when investing in stocks vs. relatively riskless assets. In my opinion, reaping the benefits of the stock market requires being a long-term investor.

By investing in a market portfolio, you’re not trying to figure out which stocks are going to thrive, and which aren’t going to be able to recover. You’re betting on human ingenuity to solve problems.

The pandemic was a big blow to the economy. But people, companies and markets adapt. That’s my worldview. Whatever the next blow we face, I have faith that we will meet the challenge in ways we can’t forecast.

I would never try to predict what might happen in the next 25 years. But I do believe the best investment strategy going forward is to keep in mind the lesson learned from that stranger back in 1997: Don’t panic. Invest for the long term.

Footnotes

Data presented for the growth of $1 are hypothetical and assume reinvestment of income and no transaction costs or taxes. This value is for educational purposes only and is not indicative of any investment.

Dominic Thomas
Solomons IFA

You can read more articles about Pensions, Wealth Management, Retirement, Investments, Financial Planning and Estate Planning on my blog which gets updated every week. If you would like to talk to me about your personal wealth planning and how we can make you stay wealthier for longer then please get in touch by calling 08000 736 273 or email [email protected]

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GET IN TOUCH

Solomon’s Independent Financial Advisers
The Old Mill Cobham Park Road, COBHAM Surrey, KT11 3NE

Email – [email protected] Call – 020 8542 8084

7 QUESTIONS, NO WAFFLE

Are we a good fit for you?

Take Survey

PRIVACY POLICY | DATA PROTECTION

Why long term investing is crucialJemima Thomas2025-02-10T17:07:21+00:00