August 2026

WELCOME

Welcome to The Crazy Plan where our mission is to show that anyone can create unimaginable wealth.

Each month, we publish a blog providing readers with the financial education needed to set out on their own journey to a bright financial future.  We do this by following two plans, our Monthly Plan saves £50 a month for 10 years and our Lumpsum Plan starts with a one-off £10,000.  Our aim is to turn each plan into $1 billion in one or two generations.

At first, making $1 billion seems crazy but once you realise it’s a journey then things change.  We’ll save our first £50 and from there our wealth will build to $1,000, then $5,000, then $10,000 and then $50,000.  One day, if we’re patient, we’ll have $100,000 and then we’ll be looking at $1 million.  From there it will be onwards to our $1 billion goal.  This journey of small steps is how what seems impossible becomes possible.

You can dig-in to our posts however you like or if you are completely new to investing, you may want to start with “1.0 Liftoff!” and go through them in order which is how we build the education.  We hope to provide you with the knowledge needed to set out on your own journey to a bright financial future if you choose.  You can also visit the “About” page on our website to learn more about our plan.

All readers must read and agree to our Terms & Conditions, including the Disclaimer, which can be found on the T&C page of our website: https://thecrazyplan.com

ON WITH THE PLAN

Our Lumpsum Plan will be worth $1billion in: 76yrs

Our Monthly Plan will be worth $1billion in: 85yrs 9mths

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Milestones

This month has seen two milestones for The Monthly Plan, hitting £2,000 of wealth and breaking the 86-year barrier to reach $1 billion.  We can’t emphasise enough how important it is to celebrate these steps on our journey as they are the real-world proof that our plan is working.  Always make sure you compare yourself to your own personal goals and celebrate achieving them, not to someone else.  Doing this builds motivation which will spur you on in your journey and keep you committed to building a bright financial future.

Last month we performed our quarterly portfolio review and put together a watchlist for the first time.  We used our four-core metrics of Return, Consistency of Return, Drawdown and Drawdown Length to see if we could improve our portfolio.  The review threw up a couple of investments that would have improved the historic return of our portfolio but when we dug a little deeper, we saw that the consistency of the portfolio was reduced significantly.  We decided to keep our portfolio unchanged as for us, consistency is a high priority.  The new funds we found have been added to our watchlist and we’ll see what our next quarterly review in September brings.

This month we’re going to look at some practical steps to building a watchlist as there’s a sea of information out there when you start researching.

BUILDING A WATCHLIST

The last few posts on how to pick funds have made it seem quite easy as we’ve just talked about CAGR, the Worst Returns, Drawdowns and Drawdown Length and plucked numbers out of thin air but where did they come from?  In the real world, some work needs to be done to get this information and whilst we can’t possibly cover everything in this post, we’ll guide you to some key areas.  The post has two main sections: general research; and calculating our four-core metrics.

GENERAL RESEARCH

The first areas we’ll cover are how to get started with general research and we’ll look at:

• Spreadsheets and Notebooks
• Where to Start
• Charts & Candlesticks
• Initial Return Filter
• Getting More Information

Spreadsheets & Notebooks

The first think we need to think about is where to keep our watchlist and the best place is in something called a spreadsheet.  If you don’t know what a spreadsheet is then it’s basically an app that’s a table of rows and columns forming a table.  Each cell in the table can store data (numbers or words) or formula that calculate a result from other cells.  Spreadsheets can do repeat calculations which saves a huge amount of time and reduces the chance of making a mistake.  Spreadsheets can also be saved so we can save our current watchlist, do some research and then add another fund when we find one.

There are two main spreadsheets and they are Microsoft Excel and Google Sheets.  Both of them provide a free version and Microsoft has a paid version that comes with many more features and capabilities.  If you don’t know how to use a spreadsheet then that’s this month’s task, go and look at spreadsheets and work out how to use them at a basic level as over the coming years, it will make your life much easier.

Crazy as it might sound, if you don’t know how to use a spreadsheet then grab a notebook.  A digital one or an old-school paper one will do but the important thing is to start your watchlist whilst you learn about spreadsheets.  Once you are comfortable with spreadsheets you can move your watchlist over from your notebook.  Whatever you do, start your watchlist and start learning about spreadsheets!

Where to Start

At this stage of our journey with our wealth being small, we want to keep our costs down so we’re going to point you in the direction of free information.  Sometimes this can mean doing a little more work than a paid-for service but we’ve touched on the impact of costs on CAGR before.

The first thing we need to do is find the names of funds we may be interested in.  The usual search options on-line are a good place to start and back in post “1.10 Choosing Companies to Invest In” we talked about investment styles.  Using those styles and searching for Investment Trusts or ETFs focused on Value Investing, Growth Investing, Quality Investing and Momentum is a great place to start.  You can also add in geography as well if you want to be more focused.  Example searches might be:

• Top 10 UK growth Investment Trusts
• Top 10 global stock market tracker ETFs
• Top UK Investment Trusts by 5-year performance
• Biggest Information Technology ETFs in the US
• Japanese stock market index ETFs

The search will probably come up with a list of funds and also a lot of websites.  Many of these will be stock brokers, investment platforms and investment websites and often they put together lists of “top” funds so that’s a great place to start as well.  Let’s not ask what “top” means!

Additionally, for investment trusts in the UK there’s the Association of Investment Companies (the “AIC”) and in the US there’s the Closed-End Fund Association (the “CEFA”).  These are great places to start as they focus on Investment Trusts and also have powerful search tools to filter and find trusts, sorting by return for example.

For ETFs, some of the biggest providers are Blackrock, Vanguard, State Street and Invesco.  Their websites allow you to find all manner of ETFs from S&P500 and World Trackers to subsector ETFs such as information technology.

Remember, when you search, you’re looking for funds that invest in equities, not bonds, commodities or other assets, so if there’s a filter, select “Equity”.

Charts & Candlesticks

We’ll take a quick diversion here as the next stages involve using charts so we need to know how to read a chart.  Most websites have charting tools and usually there are several options for what type of chart to show.  The simplest is just a line chart based on closing prices but we prefer an option called Candle or Candlestick because it gives more information.  The easiest way to explain is with a quick example:

The word “Period” for each point on the chart relates to what time-period the prices are for and it could be a Day, Week or Month.  Let’s assume that Period is Days so the chart above shows 5 days of prices.  Each day then has four pieces of information which are the opening price for the day, the closing price at the end of the day, the highest price reached during the day and the lowest price hit during the day.  These are then split into two sections on each day.

The opening price and closing price form the solid-coloured block which is either green if the share price went up on the day or red if it went down.  Taking the first day on the chart (“Period 1”) we can see that the bar is red so that means the share price went down on the day.  Therefore, the opening price on that day must have been 40 (the top of the red bar) and the share price ended the day at 25 (the bottom of the bar).

The highest and lowest prices of the day then form the vertical line that goes through the coloured bar.  So, at some point on Day 1 the share price hit a high of 60 and at some point it hit a low of 10.

That’s all candlestick charts are, a way of displaying the four key prices on a chart.  If the period is Months, then for Month 3 (“Period 3”) the share price went up in the month as the bar is green.  It therefore started the month at 50 and ended the month at 60.  During the month the highest the price reached on any day was 70 and the lowest it hit was 30.

When we pull up a chart on a website we’ll usually look at a 10-year chart as our four-core metrics are calculated over 10 years.  When we do this, most websites will set the chart to show monthly data instead of daily so if we use a candlestick chart, we can still see the highs and lows of the share price during the month.  This is really helpful as you’ll see later on in the post when we get to drawdowns.

Initial Return Filter

To decide whether to add a fund to our watchlist we look at its return over the last 10 years.  As we saw back in post “2.7 Stock Market Returns: Long Term CAGR”, returns fluctuate over time and so using a fixed hurdle rate of say 10% could be a problem.  If markets sell off hard for a period of time and funds do poorly, we might not find anything as the best CAGR over the last 10 years might only be 7%.  To overcome this, we use the worst return of all the funds currently on our watchlist.  Because we update our watchlist every 3 months the hurdle rate will move as markets move.  It also means we’re trying to find funds with a better CAGR than the worst on our watchlist so we’re always trying to improve.

On our watchlist last month, IEM has the worst 10-year CAGR at 9.5% so this is our hurdle rate.  9.5% a year means that after 10 years, £1 would be worth £2.48 (1 * (1 + 9.5%) ^{^ 10} = 2.48).  We now simply pull up a 10-year chart of the fund we’re interested in and see if it’s beaten this by taking the most recent share price and dividing it by the price 10 years ago.  We know about candlestick charts now so we can easily read off the closing prices for the months we’re interested in.

If that number is greater than 2.48, we’ll add the fund to our watchlist unless it’s an obvious Spike or Step in which case we’ll pass and move on.  We talked about Spike, Step and Slope back in post “3.5 Choosing a Fund: Strong Foundations.”  Sometimes we’ll accept a lower return than 9.5% and that’s when the chart is a great Slope so look out for these as consistency is extremely valuable.  Finally, don’t forget that toggling on a log-scale on charts helps to see Spike, Step and Slope more easily.

Getting More Information

What if you just have a name of a fund but the website or results list doesn’t have a charting tool?  Some of the bigger websites worth looking at that provide charting tools and more information on investing are:

• Google Finance
• Investing.com
• Morningstar
• Yahoo Finance

We tend to use all the above sites as it’s always good to keep an eye on them as they often release new features.

So, it really is that simple: work out the return hurdle; look at a 10-year chart for the target fund; if the return is better than the hurdle, calculate our core metrics; or if the fund is a really good Slope, calculate our core metrics.  If you decide to calculate the four-core metrics and add the fund to your watchlist, there are two paths to take depending on if you are really good at spreadsheets or okay / new to spreadsheets.

If you are really good at spreadsheets then some of the above websites allow you to get the daily prices of the fund for the last 10 years and save them into your spreadsheet.  From there you can set up some formulas to calculate the four-core metrics and add the fund to your watchlist.  That’s all we’re going to say on this method, after all, you’ve said you are “really good at spreadsheets”!  This is by far the best solution and should be your long-term aim even if at the moment you’re just okay / new to spreadsheets.

If you’re okay / new to spreadsheets then you need to take a more manual approach as you develop your spreadsheet skills so we’ll give you some pointers below.  You could initially do this by hand but we strongly recommend you spend the next month learning basic spreadsheet skills to automate the process as this will be hugely beneficial.

CALCULATING OUR FOUR-CORE METRICS

We’ve been through our four-core metrics a couple of times now in posts “3.5 Choosing a Fund: Strong Foundations” and “3.6 Choosing A Fund: Pause & Rewind” so if you’re still slightly unsure on them, go back and re-read those posts.  To help with the practicalities we’re going to look at the following areas:

• Apples to Apples
• Return & Consistency of Return
• Drawdowns
• Drawdown Length

Apples to Apples

As we build our watchlist we have to be able to compare Fund A with Fund B and Fund A or B with our Live Portfolio.  This means the four-core metrics for every fund must be calculated over exactly the same time-period.  We can’t calculate them for a new fund for the 10 years to 28/Aug/2026 but add it to a watchlist where the metrics were last updated for the 10 years to 30/Jun/2026 as a lot can happen in two months in stock markets.  It’s far less important to have data that’s totally up to date than it is to have consistent data that can be compared.

The last watchlist we built was for the 10 years to 30/Jun/2026 so all research must use these dates even though they’re a little out of date.  Once we get to 30/Sep, we’ll update all our metrics for all funds on our watchlist to 30/Sep and then new research will use these new dates.  We can’t emphasise enough how important this point is, we need to be able to compare how different funds performed over the same market conditions so that means using the same dates.

If you’re really good at spreadsheets then you’ll have daily data and will have automated calculating our four-core metrics so the rest of this section is not needed.  Below, we lay out the method for readers who are not yet pros at spreadsheets.

Return & Consistency of Return

The first things to calculate are our return metrics so 10-year CAGR and WRTN:CAGR.  In post “3.6 Choosing A Fund: Pause & Rewind” we set out a table under section “METRIC #2 – CONSISTENCY OF CAGR” which showed 11 share prices in a table and from these we can calculate our two return metrics.

The easiest way to get the 11 prices is to read them off a chart and if you hover over a point on the chart, it will show you the share prices.  We’ve just discussed candlestick charts so if the chart is monthly and the bar is red, you need the lower price of the bar for the closing price of the month, if it’s green you need the top price of the bar.  Don’t forget Apples to Apples so at the moment, get the share prices for 30/Jun/2026, 30/Jun/2025 etc annually back to 30/June/2016 which is 11 prices.  Another way to get the prices is that some websites let you see “Historic prices” and you can click on this option.  When you use this feature, you put in a couple of dates and the website returns a table of share prices for all days between those dates.

Once we have all 11 prices, the first thing we do is calculate our first metric, the 10-year CAGR, using the share prices on 30/June/2026 and 30/June/2016.  If you need a refresher on how to calculate CAGR from two prices a quick search on-line will help, remember this is a key skill to have in your toolkit.

Next, we calculate the 10 annual moves in the share price from the 11 prices as shown in the table in that post 3.6. We then simply take the 5 smallest annual returns, compound them and work out the CAGR as we did in the post.

All of this can easily be set up on a spreadsheet so you just input the 11 share prices and the spreadsheet will calculate the 10-year CAGR and WRTN.CAGR automatically.  It really is worth spending time learning about spreadsheets and setting this up as it will make your life so much easier.  Remember, this is the post where we said it would give you an excuse to give up but if you want to succeed, you must push through and learn the spreadsheet way.

Drawdowns: DD.Avg

For drawdowns, we really need daily data but that’s over 2,500 prices to type in!  Even if we relax that to weekly data that would still be over 500 prices and monthly would still be more than 120 prices!  So, the reality is that it’s just not practical to do drawdowns unless you’re really good at spreadsheets.  So, should we give up?  By now you know our answer, no.  A solution is to just get the biggest drawdown, not the five biggest.  As long as we’re consistent and use just the single biggest drawdown for every fund on our watchlist that will be fine as we’ll be able to compare them. 

When you look at a chart it’s usually pretty easy to see the biggest sell off on the chart.  All we need to do is get two prices and from there we can calculate the drawdown.  Assuming the chart we’re looking at has the “Period” as months from our earlier candlestick discussion, we would:

• Find the month where the sell off started and get the highest price (so the top of the vertical line, not the coloured bar). Using the above example, the highest price was reached in Period 4 and was 75.
• Find the month where the subsequent lowest low happened (the bottom of the vertical lines) and get the lowest price.  At the moment that would be Period 5 and the low price of 20 which is the bottom of the vertical line.

Our drawdown would therefore be (1 – 20/75) = 73% and instead of DD.Avg we just have DD.

Drawdown Length: DDT.Avg

It’s the same for Drawdown Length as we can’t realistically get 100’s of prices manually. We’ll just get the longest drawdown which means we only need two dates and we’ll calculate DDT instead of DDT.Avg.  Again, just look at a chart and you’ll be able to see the longest drawdown pretty easily so just find the start and end dates.  In your spreadsheet you can take the difference between them and that will be the longest drawdown in calendar days.  If the “Period” is months you’ll only be able to get the Drawdown Length to the nearest month but that’s better than doing nothing.

One thing to note is that on our watchlist our DDT.Avg is in business days, not calendar days, so what should you do?  Nothing, just stick with calendar days.  All we do is compare one fund to another and it doesn’t matter whether you use calendar or business days.  All we do with this metric is see which fund has shorter drawdowns and calendar days work just fine.

Again, if you’re really not able to use spreadsheets right now then you could calculate the difference between the two dates in Years, Months and Days and then simply get the calendar days which are Years * 365 + Months * 30 + Days and that will work.  We now have our four-core metrics and can add the fund onto our watchlist.

CONCLUSION

Of all of our posts we’ve written, this has been our least favourite so if you haven’t enjoyed reading it then we’re not surprised!  If you’re an expert at spreadsheets then you’ll breeze through calculating the metrics but if you’re okay / new to spreadsheets then we’ve probably given you more questions than answers.

Finding funds is the foundation of growing our wealth and the areas we’ve directed you to will allow you to build a watchlist.  If all you’ve gained from this post right now is that this is difficult without using a spreadsheet then that’s great as it tells you to spend the next month learning spreadsheet basics.  There are plenty of beginner courses on line to help you learn and it won’t take too long.

We suggest you pick a random fund from our watchlist and first of all get the 13 prices needed from a chart (11 for CAGR and 2 for DD) and the two dates (for DDT).  Then try and put these into a spreadsheet and calculate the metrics one by one and you should get close to the numbers we did if you use 30/Jun/2026 as the last date.  Like all of the habits and skills we’re building, the more you do it the easier it will become.

Remember that if you want to create a bright financial future it doesn’t happen on its own so don’t give up.  Finding funds is a constant treasure hunt that we do week in, week out and trust us when we say it will become second nature.  Whatever you do, start with the above areas to guide your research and build from there.

THE INVESTMENT REPORT

For an explanation of The Investment Report and The Crazy Fund please see our post “1.1 The Deep End”

Fri 28-Aug-26	Monthly Plan	Lumpsum Plan
Cash last month £	51	0
Cash Saved £	50	0
Unit buys / sells £	0	0
Total Cash £	101	0
Units last month	1,097	10,000
Units bought / sold	0	0
Total Units owned	1,097	10,000
Unit Price £	1.7960	1.7960
Fund Value £	1,970	17,960
Total Wealth £	2,072	17,960
FX Rate	1.3566	1.3566
Total Wealth $	2,810	24,365
Estimated CAGR	15.00%	15.00%
Years to $1billion	85yrs 9mths	76yrs

The monthly plan continued saving and together with a solid return from our portfolio it took us through the £2,000 and 86-year milestones for the first time.  What both plans share in common is patience and just accepting volatility for what it is, short-term noise.  Our wealth might be small now but with patience, once compounding starts to really kick in, one day we’ll be looking at numbers that we thought impossible.

THE CRAZY FUND

Results	31-Jul-26	28-Aug-26	MTD Move	YTD Move	LTD Move
Unit Price £	1.7020	1.7960	5.53%	22.61%	79.60%
FX Rate	1.3472	1.3566	0.70%	0.71%	6.63%
Unit Price $	2.2929	2.4365	6.26%	23.47%	91.50%
CAGR £	22.88%	24.65%	1.77%	3.63%	24.65%

It was a great month with our investments making 5.5% and the FX rate going our way by a small amount with the result being that we almost recovered the losses made in July.  The chart shows just how volatile investing is but with over 2½ years behind us now, there are small signs of a longer-term trend beginning to show.  It’s still extremely early on in our journey but we’re ahead of plan for now as the green line shows.

Below is a table of what the fund is invested in at 28/August:

Ticker	% Fund	Price	CCY	Type	Description
LON:CSP1	9.3%	61,718.00	GBP	ETF	iShares Core S&P 500 UCITS (Acc) GBP Hedged
LON:JAM	9.0%	1,218.00	GBP	IT	JP Morgan American Investment Trust PLC
LON:EQQQ	9.4%	53,574.00	GBP	ETF	Invesco NASDAQ 100 UCITS GBP Hedged
LON:IITU	10.1%	3,827.00	GBP	ETF	iShares S&P 500 Information Technology
LON:XDWT	10.3%	146.63	USD	ETF	Xtrackers MSCI World Information Technology UCITS
LON:ATT	10.5%	712.00	GBP	IT	Allianz Technology Trust PLC
LON:PCT	11.6%	656.00	GBP	IT	Polar Capital Technology Trust PLC
LON:SMT	10.2%	1,492.50	GBP	IT	Scottish Mortgage Investment Trust PLC
LON:OCI	10.2%	542.00	GBP	IT	Oakley Capital Investments Limited
LON:XDEM	9.3%	7,148.00	GBP	ETF	DB X-Trackers MSCI World Momentum Factor UCITS
Shares	99.9%
Cash	0.1%

During the month there were no changes to the portfolio and the following dividends were added to our cash balance:

• LON:JAM went ExDiv on 27/Aug and will pay on 05/Oct

A FAVOUR

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NEXT MONTH

Next month we’re going to start to look at the actual process of buying shares.  We’ll look at some of the different types of investment account you could have and we’ll also start to think about costs, particularly tax, as they can have an impact on the type of investment account you set up.

DISCLAIMER

Please note that by the time this blog is published, we may no longer own some or any of the investments discussed.  Strategies and investments discussed might be totally unsuitable for you and we are not recommending them to you, they should only be considered as ideas for further research.  You must read and agree to our Terms & Conditions, including the Disclaimer, which can be found on the T&C page of our website: https://thecrazyplan.com

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