Milu

It’s only applicable to you if you live in Ireland as a tax resident but were not born here. If this is your situation then due to a status called ‘resident non domicile’ all of your offshore assets don’t fall under Irish tax net until you choose to remit them (transfer to Irish bank account). If you choose to keep the onshore indefinatley then they can grow tax free and either be spent outside of Ireland, or if you ended up leaving Ireland and moving back to home country they would never need to be remitted. The UK had a similar loophole but they have tightened theirs up relative to Irelands. Wife doesn’t pay Canadian taxes anymore, had to file some final tax return in Canada when we left and that was end of that.

Thanks for the answers so far, one thing I should have also added is that it can’t be ETF, due to another nonsensical aspect of this Irish tax policy etf’s don’t come under this offshore tax free rule and are liable for tax at a 38% rate. So we can only do single stocks. This is what makes it tricky for me to decide, as I need a few reliable single stocks at fair prices that will hopefully go up over coming years and provide some capital gains or dividends that give us some tax free spending money every few years. Not my usual investment approach of set it an forget for 10 years plus.

Due to unique scenario with Irish tax system and non-domicile status of my wife I have a somewhat unique requirement. Wife has cash (Cad) in her canadian brokerage account, it can't be remitted back to ireland due to convoluted remittance rules, however it can be kept offshore, invested tax free, and spent offshore. All permitted by the resident non-domicile status of individuals not born in Ireland but reside here for tax purposes. So due to this we'd have perhaps 50-100k, possibly more, that would be invested in a some reliable, fairly valued canadian compounders, that we would sell down a small amount when we go back for holidays and other trips. And otherwise just let them compound without much management. So for example buy 75,000 of Canadian stock A, or maybe portfolio of Canadian stock a, b, and c, Portfolio grows to 100k over a few years, visit Canada for holiday, sell down 10k of portfolio for spending money, rinse and repeat. First things that come to mind might be something like Fairfax or Constellation Software, but curious to get further input on what might be a good approach for this requirement?

I think you might be right, just might take longer than expected before this point comes, could end up playing out with Bitcoin going nowhere for 5-10 years and then in the space of a single year exploding up 500%. Many of the bulls might have sold up shop by that stage and then at the moment everybody has given up, boom. Classic market punishment.

I'd also encourage people to watch from minute 40 where he goes into Tesla and its potential edge in the self driving world we are entering into.

Seeing the recent run in gold is making me more bullish on bitcoin's potential price appreciation. I've owned both over the years but ultimately settled on Bitcoin as my primary store of value asset. With gold I would only hold physical bullion but every time I considered going this route I had to deal with the bid ask spread of 2-3% which would result in a roundtrip cost of about 5-6% if you wanted to buy and sell, also have to have full trust in the dealer that they are selling you 100% gold, then have to store it somewhere, bank vault if want full security but then are paying storage costs and have small degree of counterrparty risk, or store it at my house and deal with the risk of having it stolen. For large central banks or businesses I can see the value in holding and storing physical gold but for the average individual bitcoin ticks a lot more of the boxes, it's 100% verifiable, no counterparty risk, divisible to the penny, and can be stored on a usb stick or in 24 words. The risks on this side is not losing access to coins and quantum risk. I think people will eventually come around to Bitcoin being a better method to store wealth than gold, but perhaps it will take a few decades. We have 5000 years of history vs about 17.

The ultimate contrarian bet right now would be short gold or silver.

I’d be more comfortable buying CSU than CRM.

Seems like every poster is buying CSU shares lately. I’m curious what the historical success rate is for forum darlings like these? I’m still on the fence about the business but pricing could be getting closer to the point where you might get a margin of safety for the risk.

Same for me, not American either so not as directly connected to him as the American posters on the forum. I like how he served as a good counterweight to a lot of the woke nonsense we had to go through during Covid. And the idea of having a team of successful business folk around him aligns better with my preference than a group of career politicians. I also think that the media often gets overdramatic in their treatment of him compared to ‘normal’ politicians doing the same things. I just think over the last few months he has gone in a few directions I don’t agree with.

I usually cut trump a lot of slack but I must admit that even I am growing a bit tired of some of the recent actions. He’s had a lot of success with his aggressive bullying posture so continues to push things further and further to the point of being unreasonable. The art of the deal should be built around some sort of win win for both parties, not crushing your counterparts into submission.

Yup, I’ve read it and found it a decent read about how to live your life. He seems like a decent guy.

Same for me. I actually think that having a high cap gains rate has made my investment returns better than if I lived in low tax regime. Any buys I make have to be based on 10+ year holding plan, ideally multi decade and it reduces the tendency to trade in and out of positions for short term gain.

Guy Spier is another one of those curious ‘gurus’ that people in the value stock community seem to pay attention to. Seems like a nice guy, has had a long track record of mostly average returns. I’ve never found anything too memorable or useful from his book or any podcasts where he’s been interviewed. I don’t know whether he strategically cultivated interest himself through some smart self promotion or whether other people find him insightful when it comes to investing.

I don’t, I’m fine letting the winners ride. Perhaps if a position got up to something large like 30%+ I’d consider trimming a little but so far hasn’t come up yet. it’s not fully rational as I suppose you could make the argument that buying in at 20% is the same as holding a position of 20% but sometimes we investors aren’t fully rational.

Thanks for all the feedback/suggestions, I think the general consensus is if you like investing just keep doing it, and be sure to leave some guidance to wife and kids should anything happen. Seems like a good approach.

Seems like a good balance between conviction in the idea but leave open possibility of being wrong. I'd never be comfortable putting 20% of my capital into a single idea, I'm never going to be confident enough to do that. anything from 7-10% results in a hypothetical portfolio of 10-15 positions which seems ok to me.

I follow something similar, I am confident enough in my buying skills to be comfortable putting a max 10% at initial cost. After that though I will let winners run to whatever percentages they want. Doing a max of 10% allows me for a large enough commitment to move the needle, but that also in a worst case scenario if I was completely wrong and the company went bust, I’d handle losing 10% of the portfolio. Has never happened but I like the feeling of a capped downside of 10% on each new position.

Same for me, investing is my hobby outside of my normal 9-5 job. A max of about 10 positions is about all I can manage, if I accumulate more than that my brain sees too much clutter and needs to simplify. My top 4 positions are about 60% of the portfolio.

Well if you want to realise the gain in order to spend the money then I’ve no issue with that. But much of the above thread is concerning selling in order to invest the proceeds into another position. In that case you didn’t yet need the money so didn’t need to pay taxes yet. So if you currently hold asset A which you bought for 100 and is now worth 200, if you and pay capital gains of 25% you now have capital of 175. If you then invest that 175 into asset B which you believe will do better, this asset need to compound at a much higher rate than the one you sold just in order to break even. And the larger the capital gains tax rate the higher the differential in growth your new position needs to outperform the old.

No neither of those, I don’t spend too much time and not too bothered about underperformance. It’s only really about a scenario if I got hit by bus at some point and then our full asset portfolio based on my investing strategy is now the responsibility of my wife who has no interest or knowledge in investing. Hopefully this won’t be a scenario we encounter but I was just thinking about what she should do in that scenario.

Yes the rate of capital gains tax and the effect that would make on your capital base is so large that the investor always needs to be extra careful when realising a gain as the asset you replace it with has to make substantially larger return than the one you sold just to break even. It gets more and more important the high the cgt rate of the country/juristiction is. For example if you live in Denmark or Norway (something like 38%), France (30%) or Ireland (33%) you need to really have confidence in the sale and what you are replacing it with.

One thing I have been thinking about a lot lately is for people with families does there come a time to hang up your investing boots and just index. I really love the game of investing and I manage 100% of my families capital allocation. This has resulted in a concentrated portfolio of around 10 assets (mainly large cap US companies, some bitcoin, and a couple of international stocks). My wife just leaves it to me and has no real interest in this which is fine for now. Net worth is a couple of million that based on my prior compounding rates could continue to double every 4 or 5 years. If I got hit by a bus tomorrow it might be quite difficult for my wife to know what to do with everything. For example some of my assets have very large unrealised capital gains, others are in pensions, some are cryptocurrencies with their own complexities. I'm 42 now and would like to keep investing for as long as possible but also need to balance this obsession with need to do what's best for family. Obvioulsy a default suggestion is just sell and index, but paying a large chunk of capital gains in order to do so might not be optimal. Or perhaps I could just start to allocate any future capital to an ETF based strategy. Either way I'm hoping I'll have a long life ahead of me to decide but curious what people on this board have done, or any advice from people further ahead in life than me have.

I find the best approach whenever trump does something is to go through these few questions 1. Has a former US president or other western world leader done something similar to this? 2. Was I worried/outraged when they did? 3. If not, then why am I getting worried/outraged this time? The answers to these usually prevents the common knee-jerk reaction that the media has instilled that everything trump does is unprecedented.

this kind of approach can be quite fruitful when starting to invest, I did it myself for the first 5-10 years. Do nothing and just save money when the market is on a bull run, buy great companies during the inevitable bear markets, do nothing and save for a few more years, buy on the next bear market, etc. It stops working once the capital gets so large that the savings piece becomes such a small piece of the overall pie that it becomes mostly irrelevant which is where I am at these days.