@nickbell47. Lovely to hear from you and thanks for the offer of...

@nickbell47. Lovely to hear from you and thanks for the offer of contact. I must admit that ALF is the one fund where I feel that I was ”cheated” by stupidity. Not in an illegal sense, but by JBs ignorance and inflexibility. Although I have a couple of managed funds, I prefer the freedom of making my own choices and despite ALF, have invested in a couple of LICs, RF1 being my latest. I am also in GC1 but I am cautious with that one as it does not publish its top 10-20 holdings every month and one doesn’t know if a major holding one month, is still there the next. Other recent purchases have been FDV and EZL, PNI and ST1, so you can see that my purchases are quite varied and based on results, what I read about them, if they sit as a major holding in a fund that I respect, etc. I dont necessarily think that your SMSF was a bad rec, but of course it depends on how confident u are in stock picking and how much you have in the fund and what the costs of compliance is.,It also depends if you need the SMSF to provide an income and of course at our age ? We need to take out that minimum amount every year and need to have an income stream and cash balance. I subscribed to Motley Fool, not so much for their recommendations, but because of a pricing error that I couldn’t pass up and to read their forum. Well..... it’s an eye opener about how many posters are in all these ETFs and “internal” funds with all these high tech stocks full of promise and expectations with 25% of the fund being in APT and the members being surprised when they lose large % in a fairly short time. I am also in an LIC. Spheria Emerging Fund (SEC) and they are value managers rather than growth. Too late to buy them now but have a look at a graph of their performance and read a couple of their monthly reports. While I think of it, I use a fairly basic charting program as a visual reference to where stocks hav been. It’s called “Incredible Charts” and its free. I don’t use it to buy stocks, but I have 3 fairly simple moving averages and a volume ? Also with moving averages that gives an idea if a stock is on the nose or ascending. I would definitely have been better off if I had referred to the chart prior to making purchases.
I also invested some cash on behalf of my in laws the other day and bought BAP at 6.85 And also Coles and BWPT, so you can see that I generally like value stocks, off their highs (hopefully near their lows,) with a reasonable dividend yield. I live in Wagga in NSW and my surname can also be found in the ph book. It’s the same as a rather unsuccessful NSW politician who rather forcefully shook John Howard’s hand