Vanguard Portfolio Update - May 2026

Welcome into my Vanguard portfolio update for the month of May. As usual, we'll have a look at the markets, go through some of the most important news stories of the last month. Then I'll go into my portfolio and then give a little bit of a lesson of whatever is important this month. As usual, timestamps below if you want to skip anywhere. But firstly, let's jump straight into markets. Let's have a look how the S& P 500 has done over the past month. You'll see this on screen now. It's actually had an incredible month. If you have a look at this, up 7% at least at the time of making this video. Year to date though, it's up about the same. And that's due to it actually bottoming out around the 30th of March. But over the past month, it's set multiple new all-time highs, which to a lot of people will have their brains completely frazzled at the moment with everything going on in the world. The S& P 500 is still setting new all-time highs. And of course, I'll be talking a lot about some of those reasons in the news stories just after the market update in the moment. Anyway, moving on to just a global market now. Let's have a little bit of a look. Similar story here, up nearly 6% actually at the time of making this video. Just using FWRG as our guideline here. The Footsie index up year to date over 8%. So actually performing better than the S& P 500 at the moment. Combination of a few different factors. Something I'll touch on very briefly as we talk about in the news section. Now final market just to have a little bit look at here. Have a look at the Footsie 100. not having a great month, down 3% so far, although up year to date about 3%. And then just expanding that out a little bit longer if you do want to have a look at the year-to- date figures, up almost 20%. Not quite near those all-time highs. So, it's not the same sort of story as the S& P 500. And again, I'll be talking about that in the news story because lots of different things happening in the markets at the moment. Topping my news headlines this month is a story I just hinted at when looking at the

market. So, the S& P 500, as you can see at the moment, has closed in on multiple all-time highs during the past month. That actually caps six consecutive weeks of gains, which is just incredible to say. And sitting at the moment around 7,400 points or under, which would not surprise me if that's actually beaten a lot of the targets that some of the analysts had for the entire year. Now leading the charge in a lot of those increases is really from the Magnificent 7 stocks and a lot of the big tech stocks have had their earnings this month. As you can see around 84% of companies actually beat their Q1 earnings estimates and that's the highest beat rate since mid2021 and with companies reporting earnings roughly 20% above estimates on average. Now, that puts the blended year-on-year earnings growth rate at 15. 1%, putting the index on track for a sixth straight quarter of doubledigit earnings growth, which is quite a comeback from all of the news we've been speaking about very recently, talking about everything going on with the war in Iran. And on that note, one month later, we are still talking about the conflict in Iran and everything going on, especially in the macroeconomic world around the price of oil, the straight off hormuz, and whatever's going on with the latest deal at the moment. At the moment, as the time of making this video, oil prices are above $100 a barrel. Again, Trump has rejected the latest peace deal submitted by Iran to Pakistan. Trump blasted Iran's response as totally unacceptable and tyrann's counterproposal reportedly included recognition of Iranian sovereignty over the Strait of Hormuz and a demand for war compensation and made no mention of Iran's nuclear program, which the US considers a key issue. The ceasefire technically holds, but is barely functioning and peace talks are deadlocked. Oil is above $100 I just mentioned there. The straight remains contested and this is the single biggest macro risk hanging over global markets right now. Now heading back to the US, a slightly more cheery headline is that tech earning season has finished at least reporting for first quarter of 2026. And as I did just mention there, most earnings for the biggest companies in the world have actually come across very strong and beat most expectations. Have a look here. Alphabet, the parent company of Google, rose approximately 34% in April, which is the strongest monthly gain since 2004 on a Q1B across cloud, advertising, and Whimo. Meta fell roughly 9%, which is a story I covered in another video, after raising 2026 capital expenditure guidance to $145 billion. So although the earnings were good, it's forecasting spending a lot of those profits on the AI future, which lots of people, lots of investors are not quite 100% sure of at the moment. Microsoft also fell a little bit on its results, too. Although since this video, there has been quite a bit of recovery in all these tech names that have slightly fallen. And again, the biggest concern is capital expenditures on AI, the AI arms race, data centers, chips, whoever's spending all of their profits on these things. Whether they actually make a huge profit in the future is one thing that people are of course are debating at the moment. You have to let me know also what you think in the comment section below. As always, jumping over the pond close to home to the UK. Let's briefly talk about the Footsie 100 because there was a couple of interesting things I wanted to highlight. As I did mention earlier, the Footsie 100 is under a bit of pressure at the moment, not exactly mirroring the S& P 500 setting all new time highs. Now, you might think this is slightly counterintuitive because you might think, well, shouldn't the Footsie 100 be benefiting from these higher oil prices and some of the consumer stocks because actually the Footsie 100 generates around 75 to 80% of all of its income from dollars and it tends to be stocks in finance space, in the consumer space, in the industrial space. However, there's also a couple of different things going on. So, although there are some companies benefiting from higher oil prices, you've also got lots of other stocks who will be negatively impacted by that. So all of these companies who actually produce a physical product for example, having those higher energy costs and higher costs may not be able to pass those on to consumers. So their costs are going to rise which will probably mean some lower profits in some of the quarters to come. So although some companies do benefit from the higher oil prices, the big chunk of them don't. And again, think of all the examples you've got. Airlines, industrials, retailers, all have these higher costs. And whether they pass those on to consumers is going to be one thing. And that will cause a lot of pressure on the Bank of England whether they end up reducing interest rates. At the moment, they've been held steady, but with inflation creeping up or remaining sticky, they may even be forced to increase rates to keep things under control, at least in the short term. And finally, in the news this month, not something I bring up too often, but it is always interesting to keep a track of now and then. Have a look at Halifax's latest property report going on in the UK. Halifax are one of the biggest lenders for property in the UK. So, every month they publish lots of data. It's always interesting to see what's going on in the UK property market at the moment. Let me just quote you a few of the figures because they're quite interesting at the moment. As you can see here, average house prices showed little movement in April, edging down by just 0. 1% compared to March with a typical property now costing 299,313. Now that's an annual price increase of just 0. 4%. So actually lower than the price of inflation. So that technically does mean that house prices are actually falling in real terms. Always something which is quite interesting because everyone always just assumes that house prices always go up. Let me just quote you here. After a strong start to the year, recent global developments have added a greater degree of uncertainty to the outlook. In particular, higher energy prices have fed into inflation expectations, prompting markets to reassess the path of interest rates, a shift that has already pushed up borrowing costs for many buyers. A slower pace of house price growth may be disappointing news for existing homeowners. However, for those looking to step into the property ladder, stable prices are helpful, even if higher mortgage rates mean affordability remain stretched. A slower pace of house price growth may be disappointing news for looking to step into the property ladder, stable prices are helpful even if higher mortgage rates mean affordability remain stretched. The average price paid by firsttime buyers has fallen slightly to 238908, its lowest level so far this year.

Right, with the news out the way, let's have a look at the portfolio and see how everything's been done this month. As a quick recap, just in case anyone is new watching, this is my Vanguard self-invested personal pension. So, I don't have any ISA here. All my other ISAs and other investing accounts are on different platforms. Couple of which I do actually share on this platform. So this is just my pension account which I contribute in from my limited company and it's extremely tax efficient to do so. So let me just go into that and show you now how that's performed. Now as usual if I can what I'm trying to aim with my pension is to give the maximum contribution every tax year at the moment. So I did put in £5,000 at the start of this month. I invest it straight away. I don't try and time the market. And this leads me to where I am at the moment. And I just invest it in a single global index fund. It's the Footsie Global All Cap Index Fund. The accumulation version. It just means there's no dividends paid out to me. I just want this to grow. I just want to keep it as simple as possible. What is really incredible to see is just how quickly the portfolio has grown. Obviously, because I'm putting a lot of money into the portfolio, those months just sneak up on you. And it wasn't that long ago before I was celebrating managing to get over £100,000 into my pension. And now over £180,000. You know, this year moving into next year will be well into the 200s, fingers crossed. And with a bit of growth as well, that's fantastic. But the main thing is it's so tax efficient. And that's really where the savings coming from. All the money I put in there roughly every thousand pounds I'm putting in there probably cost me personally in my company about half of that if you take into account the savings you can make on not only corporation tax but also any personal taxes like dividends taxes if I were to take that money out. So it's a really tax efficient thing to do. I might do a separate video at one point just specifically talking about this one element because I think it's a huge benefit to everyone if you're in that kind of same position. Having a look here at the performance tab pretty much shows exactly what I've been doing. I've obviously been contributing a lot of money into my pension over the past year or so trying to turbocharge those returns. And now as the portfolio gets a bit bigger, you are seeing those compounding effects of investing effectively all of those older contributions that I've made and all of that old money that was transferred in from workplace pensions is really starting to compound. So just have a look here from a monthly perspective because I think it's always interesting just to see those returns. Although everything's unrealized at the moment and they should never look at this as your money or your profit, it's really interesting to at least have a look because remember just a couple of months ago back in March, I showed my portfolio update where the investment returns were massively negative. In fact, it was one of the biggest months that my account had lost money again on an unrealized basis £9,000. But over the next two months, as you can see here, April was a stellar month, which basically got back all of those losses, all those unrealized losses from March. And then May has been really good so far. As you can see here, a market gain of 4 over4 £4,000 and the purchases in the account have been basically exactly the same, putting in that steady amounts of money as you can see here. And this is really nice now because I have all those receipts and when I put money in and you can go back now multiple years through my Vanguard portfolio update to see how the markets have been doing. And you can see if you scroll down all the way in the performance tab, you can see it was April 2022 where I actually opened the account, transferred money in from some old workplace pensions. And then of course as I'm end up working for myself started to contribute money into the account as I made some profits for my business. Of course there's always the regret I wish I put more money in but I didn't have any money at the time in my company to be able to do this. And I started to contribute smaller amounts like £500,000 and then really tried to turbocharge that in the next financial year with different lump sums but also trying to be a bit more consistent now because I do think pensions are such a an amazing tax efficient way to actually invest money. And that will lead me on nicely to the lesson of this month's video. Really I wanted to talk about two things. Two things really to that are disconnected from one of each other. And lots of people will confuse the stock market and investing with the economy and they'll say well the economy is so bad at the moment cost of living crisis etc. and all these things yet they'll look at the stock market hitting all-time highs and these things will kind of act in your head and think how does how are these things connected? Well, look, the stock market isn't the economy. And although generally in the long term, we want the economy to do well and the stock market should do well, in the short term, there is no connection between the economy and the stock market. And generally speaking, the stock market is a forward-looking device. And a lot of this was shown not only in recent tech earnings. So, for example, lots of the big tech giants beat their earnings, made billions and billions of dollars of profit, but actually their share prices went down even though they beat expectations. And some of that was down to the fact that though the companies were saying actually we're going to spend a lot more now than you thought we would. So therefore we're spending a bit more of those profits into the future in things like AI and infra AI infrastructure chips etc. And the market will do what the market wants to do and we'll buy and sell those things and trade those instantly and those share prices will decline immediately and they'll go back up again as the market sees fit. So I think it's a really important lesson and a reminder to not connect the economy and the stock market and to make assumptions that oh the economy is good therefore the stock market has to be good and the economy that you experience might be bad yet the stock market can do very good things. It's generally a forwardlooking device remember trying to guess the impact of all the different changes in the world and everyone can have their opinion. Some people are playing this game for the short term. Other long term. And some people just have no idea what they're doing and will just invest in whatever. So don't try and make sense of it. Because if you it from a simple explanation like X happens, therefore Y must happen. You're then going to put yourself into the trap of thinking, oh therefore, if X happens in the future, Y must happen. That's not how things work. If it was that easy, we would all be doing it. Remember? And another good example of this is always when we talk about the Footsie 100 as the you know the UK benchmark when actually the Footsie 100 has almost nothing to do with the UK economy or the UK as a whole gets most of its income about 75 to 80% of its income is international. You've got big companies in there which yes they might make a little bit of their revenue from the UK but really they're global companies trading on a global stage. The only thing that connects them is that they're listed on the London Stock Exchange even though they really have very little to do with the UK. So if you want a more of a benchmark to look at UK stocks, you can look at things like the Footsie All Share or some of the smaller indexes like the Footsie 250 for example. But even then, there's still lots of international exposure as well. And again, it still doesn't mean it's connected to the UK economy in the likes of the UK economy doing well. Therefore, the market has to do well. So just don't fall into that trap. And again, I think it's just noise and as a long-term investor, you just stick with your plan. You keep going no matter what and just fit your investments around you and making the right decision for you. And for me at the moment, it means being as tax efficient as possible, trying to get as much money into my p pension as possible. Basically, to allow myself some kind of financial freedom when I'm able to get hold of this money, but it's one of many options that I'll be able to tie to. I don't necessarily have a goal in mind when it comes to retirement. And I actually don't really like that word anyway. I don't even think I'm going to have any kind of traditional retirement. Like most people can't wait to quit their jobs. That's not really the experience I have in my space. So, I'm a little bit different from that. Anyway, hope you've enjoyed the video. I'll see you in the next one. As always, happy investing.