Rising Dogs of the FTSE + Random Shares

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A belated and brief progress update on my latest Dogs of the FTSE experimental portfolio which was set up in June 2020, so only another couple of months to run.

I missed buying when everything hit rock bottom in March but bad timing or not, I continue to follow the strategy as an experiment and have been documenting the bad times as well as the good.

Here’s a reminder of the Dogs of the FTSE strategy (which is based on the US Dogs of the Dow strategy):

  1. Choose the ten FTSE 100 shares with the highest yield (subject to my criteria*)
  2. Invest equal amounts in all ten shares
  3. Hold for a year (give or take a week)
  4. At the end of the year, sell the ones no longer in the top ten, replace with new shares with highest yield
  5. Repeat from step 3

[*criteria being that shares already in my portfolio are not included, nor any where a dividend cut has been announced]

Note that this is part of my ‘fun’ portfolio and represents less than 1.5% of my Future Fund – it is not what I do as a main investing strategy. All dividends received are reinvested.

Light at the end of the Tunnel

The mutts aren’t doing too badly, particularly the mining Dogs, which are showing significant gains.

Will be interesting to see if they continue to maintain their momentum.

Over the same period, the FTSE 100 Total Return was 15.70% so the Dogs are doing worse at 13.94%.

However, if I include dividends received, it’s a gain of 18.83%, so not bad really.

Let’s see what the next two months bring for the pooches and I’ll do my final update then.

Random Shares

My Random Share Portfolio is made up of free shares awarded to me whenever someone signs up to Freetrade* via my affiliate link, bagging us both a random free share (worth between £3 and £200) in the process.


Here’s the full portfolio.

I’ve kept most of the shares, occasionally selling when the odd one or two gain by >20% (quite a few did recently).

In a previous month, I was awarded a free share in Manchester United – perhaps I should have sold it when the share price went up on the back of the announcement of the European Super League.

However,  by the time I thought about it, the league had crashed and burned, with the ‘sinister six’ pulling out before it got going, so it wasn’t worth selling.  I’m not fast enough to be a trader!

Anyway, the money from the sales of any random shares are chucked into my ISA, with a few quid going towards my Winter Rock Associates Fund 😉

A big thanks to all who have signed up via my link in the past – hope you all got a decent free share!

4 thoughts on “Rising Dogs of the FTSE + Random Shares”

  1. Not heard of the “Dogs of the FTSE” before. I might look at this in the next few months. To make it worthwhile, I’d probably need to free up £1,000 to invest £100 in each of the ten stocks. Could be fun.

    • Hi David
      It’s based on the Dogs of the Dow, which you might have heard of?

      My Dogs portfolio is now with Freetrade, so no trading fees, critical when buying in small amounts. It was a little trickier when I was using another provider where the trading fees ate into the profits when I was buying/selling.

      Good luck with your Dogs portfolio!

  2. Interesting to note that the 3 companies you invested least in were the top performing ones, and the 3 you invested most in all lost money! That’s my kind of luck

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