Market value and cash levels.

[petec]

Can you invest in sector ETFs?  That might be the way I would play it - look for areas of the market you find attractive and focus there. The S&P itself is unattractive, but there are many reasonably valued companies in health care, large cap tech, retail, autos, etc. With so many new ETFs out there, you're bound to find a few that slice and dice the market in a way that makes for a more attractive package than the broad market ETFs.

 

I can and have started to do so, but I haven't found many that I really like.  Also, I find my confidence in a sector thesis is never as strong as my confidence in a stock thesis.  In practice what this means is if a stock I like goes down I am likely to add, whereas if a sector I like goes down I question my thesis and sell.  So far this hasn't worked out well!

[thowed]

I have seriously considered selling everything and putting it all in PNL and CGT.

 

Ha - you and me both!  Probably for about the past 4 years.  Unfortunately I've still been overly cautious, which has cost me so far.

 

I take your point about allocation - for me, I am happy to let them do the asset allocating for me, as they're far more clever than I am.  But I basically see them as Cash & a bit.

 

Would you consider a good Long/Short fund?  City Financial AR's David Crawford has been pretty impressive over the years in terms of good, non-index-related returns - he seems to be a genuinely decent Shorter.  I used to find the reporting a bit opaque, but it's got better recently.

 

And if you can access them (the odd occasion seems to crop up), Ennismore, I think they rode out 2008 pretty well, though possibly not 2011, from memory.