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Its Not Harry

Comment and opinion for retail investors in the UK

Mark Potter

Deep Dive – January 2026

5th January 2026 by Mark Potter Leave a Comment

This new year I will take a classical approach and do the look back and look forward that underlies the naming of the month.

I usually read what I wrote a year ago at the start of any new cycle but I note that I deferred offering a full opinion on the impact of Trump’s election until after his inauguration, so the blog post to reference is the one for February 2025.

My analysis of Trump’s likely behaviour was accurate in almost every detail.  My expectation that the US Dollar would lose credibility was also correct.  However, I did not foresee that AI would be far and away the main corporate story of the year and that the bubble I was worrying about 11 months ago would keep inflating.  I was right in my expectations of a poor climate for healthcare stocks and that money would flow into defence industry shares.

So how did markets perform in 2025?

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Filed Under: Asset Allocation, Markets, Members Only, Monthly commentary, Portfolios

DIY Investing – does it pay off?

15th December 2025 by Mark Potter Leave a Comment

Readers will have maybe noted that a great deal of the money being invested by retail investors is going into ETFs and most of those, although now a decreasing proportion, will be passive index trackers. In addition, plenty of money goes into mutual funds that are passive, and even model portfolios where the asset allocation may be varied a bit from time to time, but the underlying strategy is largely far from active and trackers are used to get market exposures.

Are we doing well?

The founder of Vanguard, which firm is now one of the largest owners of lsited investments in the world, made his name arguing that paying for portfolio management was a waste of time because the vast majority of managers in the USA failed to beat the S&P 500 index consistently. Now, we all know that is not a very complete rationale (why would the S&P 500 be your sole benchmark?, for instance) but if the index makes enough money over the long term to meet your investment objectives and it can be tracked very cheaply, why not do that? Clearly, a great many people have agreed that was the way to go!

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Filed Under: Cost of investing, Members Only, Monthly commentary, Passives and Trackers, Portfolios

Deep Dive – December 2025

1st December 2025 by Mark Potter Leave a Comment

Firstly, may I wish all my readers seasonal greetings, hoping that all your Christmas preparations are going well!  Most importantly, as most of us are the wrong side of pension age, I wish you the best of ongoing health!

Having written a couple of longish and quite technical pieces last month on AI and ETFs, I am going to offer a more leisurely and shorter read this month! The dive will not be so deep, more of a swim in interesting waters.

Not quite time to doze off!

A question to which the answer may not appear to matter that much – but it does!

That question is:

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Filed Under: Economics, Markets, Members Only, Monthly commentary

How To – Use Artificial Intelligence to Review a Portfolio of UK Investment Funds

17th November 2025 by Mark Potter Leave a Comment

(although in the format of a ‘How To’ article that would usually form part of the website’s permanent content, this topic is fluid and I am still learning, so I am leaving the article as an, albeit very detailed, blog post)

Introduction

Artificial intelligence (AI) has emerged as a game-changer across various sectors, and the investment management industry is no exception. Reviewing and managing a portfolio of UK investment funds can be a complex and time-consuming task.  I have offered subscribers some Excel workbooks over the years, more recently with support from one of your fellow investors who is a spreadsheet programming ace. Both he and I have wondered about adding AI elements to data collection process (the most boring part of the task) or even creating an app that both improves the data presentation and semi-automates the review process.

The App is a work in progress and I may well be able to offer you access to it (at a cost) at some future date, but in the meantime I have explored the possibility of AI completing a portfolio review and quite quickly learned that there can be good outcomes, with genuine portfolio insights, time savings in data analysis and (with care) reliable and repeatable date collection.

A caveat that all experienced AI users will not need to hear is that AI is like an over eager Jeeves – it will always try to please you with some sort of result, making its best efforts credible, even when in fact they are pure fiction.  That means that the way it is tasked to provide data requires some thought and requests must always be qualified with conditions that include reporting the exact sourcing and likely reliability of specific data.

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Filed Under: Education, Innovation, Members Only, Monthly commentary

Deep Dive – November 2025

1st November 2025 by Mark Potter Leave a Comment

The death on investment funds – long live ETFs!

Around 7 or 8 years ago, during the period when I was working for Headley Financial Services (HFS) after they bought my business ahead of my retirement, I was asked as the most technically qualified member of their investment committee to research and write a report for the committee on the then relatively new asset type of exchange traded funds (ETFs) and their cousins (rarer) ETCs and ETPs.

I don’t have a copy of the report now but I can more or less recall what I concluded, which was that although the likes of Vanguard had succeeded in creating cheap funds that tracked the main widely used stock market indices (by an automatic process – so passively) the market in ETFs had even by then expanded to track all sorts of other indices, including ones made to order, generally but not always at quite low cost. 

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Filed Under: Academic theory, Funds, Members Only, Monthly commentary, Passives and Trackers, Portfolios

Snippets – a foggy Autumn

20th October 2025 by Mark Potter Leave a Comment

All quiet on the Notharry front?

My readers may have noticed less blog posts recently. This had been deliberate on my part, for several reasons:

  • I had a few conversations with subscribers in which they confessed to not having time to read a few of my recent scribblings, sometimes I suspect for quite a few weeks. That means one of two things: I am posting too often or what I post is not useful or interesting. Now I am fairly sure that aside from the odd rant or attempt at dry humour, what I write IS useful to retail investors, so with that possibly conceited analysis, I have decided to reduce my frequency of posting to an average one longer read at the start of each month and one or two topical pieces in between.
  • Secondly, there are not many fundamental topics that I have not covered already in several ways: maybe a permanent long technical article, some reminder posts with cross references and now even maybe a video. I am therefore reluctant to write or record a piece that is just an unwanted repetition. On the other hand, as you know, I am very willing to write a piece on a subject that a particular subscriber wants explained or for me to comment on. Just tell me what you need!
  • Finally, current market conditions are so weird, so febrile and so full of risk (which last point I have made repeatedly already), that it is difficult to offer any intelligent guidance on portfolio servicing or reshaping over and above the usual basic essentials of being diversified, managing cash flows and taking the long view.

Nonetheless, I have collected quite a few thoughts on what are relevant factors that you might benefit from thinking about, or trends that need keeping an eye on, enough to make up one of my occasional ‘mish-mash’ lists of unconnected (or are they?) subjects that now follows.

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Filed Under: Members Only, News, Opinion, Politics, Portfolios

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Recent Posts

  • Deep Dive – November 2026 (Part 2)
  • Deep Dive – November 2026 (Part 1)
  • A little foresight?
  • Mid-Month Musings – Snippets
  • Deep Dive – October 2026

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