Portfolio: not much changed

Not much has changed  since a couple of weeks ago - September 18 2012 (Have I made money yet?) - and although my account is up a little, I still haven't properly worked out if I'm up on when I first invested as selling out and buying back in again added some costs!

I've got a tiny bit I could invest, I need to do some revision before making any decisions though.

I've also failed to work out what sort of exposure Black Rock Gold and General has to the South African mining problems.

In an August factsheet the fund said that it was losing out because regulations mean it can't hold more than 10% in any one asset and some of the big miners make up more than 10% of the index it tracks: " Gold advanced 3.3% and silver was up 8.2% over the course of the month as investors looked for ways to hedge their portfolios against the potential inflationary impacts of any forthcoming stimulus. The Fund’s structural underweight to larger cap gold miners Barrick, Newmont and Goldcorp was a material detractor to relative performance as these stocks gained strongly as general investors sought more liquid gold producers in the face of the advancing gold price. It should be noted that, due to UCITS regulations, the Fund is meaningfully underweight these names; it cannot match the benchmark weightings in these stocks as they are in excess of 10% (for example, Barrick Gold is over 16% of the FTSE Gold Mines Index).


On South Africa: "The Fund’s exposure to off benchmark South African platinum miner Impala Platinum was also a source of underperformance as the stock lagged due to the industrial unrest in the South African platinum industry. On the positive side, our underweight position in AngloGold was helpful for relative performance as the South African based company was also dragged lower due to investor concerns over the impact an escalation of the unrest in South Africa could potentially have on its operations. It should be noted that the Fund is underweight South Africa at the aggregate level."

I wasn't sure if the weighting related to where companies were listed or where they had operations. I still don't know the answer but I looked at some of the top ten investments and none of the ones I looked at had anything there: Randgold, Goldcorp, Newcrest etc.

I'm not sure what the stake in Evy Hambro's dad Peter Hambro's firm - Petropavlovsk - is but BlackRock's total holding fell to under 11% in May 2012 .