Investing for Brexit

The Ermine has two retirement resources. One is my DB pension, which is easily enough to live on at the moment – it is deferred for only a couple more years, because the Ermine is grizzled of fur and will reach normal retirement age for most of that pension accrual, some time after Brexit, sadly. But it’s denominated in pounds, and there’s an inflation cap on it. Neither of these had been a particular concern until June 2016.

The other is my stock market holdings, which are in two ISAs for platform diversification. I hold equities and ETFs with TD Direct, which by a quirk of fate don’t incur platform fees because TD make its money on the buy and sell commission. The ermine is not a source of rich pickings here, as my aim is to never sell in the case of the HYP or a world index ETF. Sadly TD Direct have been bought by iii, and I fell out with them a while ago for stupidly hiking fees in an attempt to make us all churn our portfolios. That good fees fortune may not stand.

I also hold funds with Charles Stanley, or rather a single fund, the excitingly named B2Q6HW6, which tracks the FTSE World (ex UK) Index. The original aim of this was to lean against the home bias of my HYP.

Brexit changes the risk balance

The classic view is a DB pension is steady as she goes, as close to gold as you can get, whereas equities are an exciting but unreliable floozy on the side. Brexit changes that because it is likely to hammer the value of the DB pension in real terms by devaluing the pound. It’s a massive risk to the UK. The rest of the world will probably tootle along just fine. Now it’s entirely possible that the Brexiteers are right and nothing of note will happen, or having flung off the yoke of the EU we will do well. Trouble is, I am very heavily exposed to the UK – the ISA is worth only about half the notional value of the DB pension, so even if it was all in foreign assets I’m more than half exposed to the UK. And what I’ve experienced so far of Brexit is inflation, and we ain’t even left yet. Now on a contrarian basis there’s an argument for buying the UK, but I felt a bit bad writing that last time, and @hosimpson and @Neverland  weren’t sold. No, I can’t really convince myself either. There might be a case to do that if I weren’t in the eye of the storm – a Frenchman could consider a small contrarian punt on the UK, but the trouble is if the  UK goes titsup so does my main pension. I don’t need any increase in UK exposure.

There are some things I could do with the pension – I could draw it a couple of years early, shovel those years into my ISA. But then I get to pay tax on my SIPP that I haven’t cleared out yet. I could take a pension commencement lump sum, which commutes some of it to cash, and invest that, but the rate isn’t terrific.

Doing nothing is iffy, I am sitting on half a house worth of cash much of it borrowed from my ISA and a Brexit steamroller coming to pummel the value of that into the ground.

The Ermine takes a sneak peek behind enemy lines

Most of what I hear of Brexit boosters comes from the Brextremist wing of the Tory party, for the simple reason that they seem to be doing most of the running these days. I obviously hear the endless barrage of whiny Remoaning, to which I am adding here, but it’s always good to hear other voices. I thought I’d look wider, and in amidst a lot of Googling, I came across these guysI confess that I quite like the cut of their jib on a lot of things, since it appears that I share some of the sovereignty issues ¹, though I am nowhere near as worked up about them as they are, and weight the economic hit much greater which explains why I am still a pusillanimous Remoaner.  I also kinda like North’s descripton of blogging as a way to learn

In the search I came across all sorts fo flotsam and jetsam, I was tickled by this piece by an anti-fangirl of Jacob Rees-Mogg, as a cheerful interlude before we get on to what Peter North thinks Brexit will mean, as led on by the no deal wingnuts. In some ways people who voted Brexit seem almost more pissed off by the mess May and her crew is making than Remainers. At least the latter know they lost the fight.

The phoenix must burn to emerge

Bloody hell, and I thought it would be bad, and North is still a fan of the process.

all JIT export manufacturing will fold inside a year… Across the board we will see prices rising… Britain is about to become a much more expensive pace to live. It will cause a spike in crime…  lot of engineering jobs to be axed since a lot of them are dependent on defence spending. It will kill off a number of parasitic resourcing firms and public sector suppliers. it will wipe out the cosseted lower middle class and remind them that they are just as dispensable as the rest of us. 

major rationalisation of the NHS and what functions it will perform. It will be more of a skeleton service than ever… a lot of zombie projects will be culled and the things that survive on very slender justifications will fall. We can also expect banks to pull the plug in under-performing businesses. Unemployment will be back to where it was in the 80’s…. Anyone who considers themselves “Just about managing” right now will look upon this time as carefree prosperity. There are going to be a lot of very pissed off people.

young people actually start doing surprising and reckless things again rather than […] tedious hipsters drinking energy drinks in pop-up cereal bar book shops or whatever it is they do these days. We’ll be back to the days when students had to be frugal and from their resourcefulness manage to produce interesting things and events.

A few years in and we will then have started to rebuild EU relations […] we are looking at a ten year recession. Nothing ever experienced by those under 50.

I really recommend you read the whole thing, I like his style, but I think he graduated at the Nietzschean school of dialectic, perhaps with coaching from Tim Gurner regarding da feckless yoof, who seem to have dropped some smashed avocado into his beer at some stage.

That which does not kill us, makes us stronger.

Mind you, I need to be careful what I say, I was/am part of the cosseted lower middle class and an engineer to boot, so already up against the wall in his world. He’s saying that the economic fallout from Brexit will blight a third of the amount of life I have left, statistically speaking. The bear case always sounds smarter. ²It’s poles apart from keep calm and carry on, and it’s a more dramatic story. But this narrative of woe comes from a fan of Brexit. Leave alliance has the most cogent takedown of the no-deal it’ll all be OK with WTO rules stance of the wingnuts – it’s not all about the tariffs guys. But in the end it’s for the Brexiteers to sort out what Brexit means, beyond the gnomic tautology of Brexit means Brexit.

In the time we have left, is there a brace position?

Foreign assets, basically. That FTSE World (ex UK) Index. There’s not enough time and I don’t have smarts enough to do anything better. It’s the world according to Lars  Kroijer but I get to atone for my seven years of nonchalance in not anticipating that my fellow countrymen would suddenly perform an act of economic hara-kiri with the ex-UK slant.

I did have a look to see if I could buy that in a L&G ISA to get rid of Charles Stanley’s platform fee but sadly the L&G ISA index funds list doesn’t include the L&G fund I want. Go figure.

It won’t be enough to compensate, but it may slow the fall a little bit. I will probably have to pay health insurance to make up for the fact the NHS will be eviscerated and life will be a bit more shit in many ways, but we will have taken back control. The same sort of control of the pilot taking a hammer to the autopilot and getting in a flat spin, but goddamn it, it’s his own flat spin till the crunch comes.

OTOH it may well go all swimmingly, bluebirds will be tweeting and there will be the fine sound of leather against willow on a thousand village greens in the joyful sunlit summers that will come when the foul yoke of the EU superstate is thrown off.

Fair enough – so what’s the worst that will happen out of my attempt to brace for Brexit if it all goes swimmingly? I will end up with a ISA that is more or less balanced according to the advice of Monevator’s tame ex-hedge fund manager, albeit oddly with the old HYP core. I guess there are worse things that could happen.

Plus I increase my risk of devaluation due to a stock market crash, since valuations are high, but then I am almost guaranteed another value of cash sort of crash with Brexit, so I’m stuck between a rock and a hard place. A market crash usually comes good in a few years, whereas Brexit looks like it will hammer the pound for a decade – and that’s according to parts of the Brexit camp, they have so little faith in the competence of Her Majesty’s Government to know their arse from their elbow. I need to pay back my ISA from the cash from the house sale, pay this year’s 20k in and get me some Brexit ballsup insurance in the form of foreign assets while the pound is still worth more than a bucket of spit.

There aren’t any good answers here. Unlike Rees-Mogg and his band of happy Brextremists I am not rich enough to come out of Brexit unscathed. I will go down with it, it’s a question of how much. I need some light relief. Let’s hear some Moggmentum from Madeleina Kay, JRM No 1 fan – not.