The current state of our family’s super fund is structurally very sound. Most of our holdings have capital gain though the recent sell off has reduced the overall value, which looked pretty good before October.

We participated in the Rio buyback, following Paul Rickard’s analysis, which said it was a no brainer for SMSFs. It means we have to work out if we buy more Rio or position ourselves for companies that should do well in 2019 and beyond.

We will also participate in the BHP buyback so we will have some important investing decisions before Christmas.

The issues for us to consider are:

• Do we think 2020 will bring a US recession?
• Will Trump sign a China trade deal before Christmas? And if he does, will this spark a rally?
• Should we buy an ETF to benefit from a Chinese stocks’ boom, if a trade deal happens?
• Are the banks going to spike once the Royal Commission recommendations are made clear? Or should we wait until we see the Government’s response and then Labor’s? And then, will the election be bad for bank share prices?

My female intuition says a China trade deal will help both the US and Chinese leaders so I want to put our money to work as soon as possible.

I liked some of the ideas in Peter’s story today out of the Hearts and Minds conference.  I especially like JB Hi-FI, which we go to all the time and it’s does seem strange that it’s the most shorted stock right now.

In the past our fund has put into action Peters “buy the dips” advice and we’ve bought STM or IOS (to play the index) or SWTZ (to get both the index and income simultaneously). Both these investments will give us more exposure to the banks and SWITZ would make our overall holdings more defensive, as we’re pretty aggressive with our current investment strategy.

With the Rio and BHP money coming in, we think it’s a good time to assess our holdings, agree on our investment strategy going forward, rebalance the portfolio to check our exposure and weightings before tackling 2019.

This is the third year of Donald Trump’s presidency and Peter says this is generally the best year for stocks! I don’t listen to a lot of what he says on the domestic front but I tend to listen to him in these areas anyway!

I hope he’s right and Mr Trump doesn’t do anything crazy to stop the S&P/ASX 200 eventually getting past the 7000 level.

I know Peter wants to see it climb to this level and so does my/our SMSF.

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