Off we go! And I've got to tell you, this is one of those top-ups that just makes me smile the whole way through, because it's got a little bit of everything I love about this game. A brand-new, genuinely exciting position that's slightly out of my usual comfort zone. A top-up of one of my favourite oddball holdings that I can't help grinning about. And a warm, familiar tuck-in of a company so dependable it might as well have its own seat at Christmas dinner. Three very different things, one shared idea: buy the good stuff, buy a bit of the fun stuff, keep the funny stuff small enough that you can't hurt yourself if it wobbles, and then — the mantra that never gets old — long term is a good term. Oh yes, off we go, and let compounding do its glorious, boring, marvellous work.
── LDGG: My Shiny, Exciting, Slightly-Terrifying New Toy ──
Let's start with the exciting one, because it's the one I've been quietly circling for a while: LDGG. That's the LGIM London Blockchain UCITS ETF, and it is very much not my usual sort of holding — which is precisely why it's fun. This little fund is my way of getting a properly diversified slice of the whole blockchain-and-digital-assets theme without me having to guess which single cryptocurrency or which single company is going to win, because frankly I haven't the foggiest and neither has anyone else who claims they do. Instead of buying one coin and betting the house on it, LDGG spreads the bet across the companies building the plumbing of the whole space — and lets me say, with total honesty, that I'm 'in on the blockchain thing' while keeping the position small enough that a bad day in crypto-land is a shrug, not a sleepless night.
And that's the beauty of it, isn't it? You get to have a genuinely exciting, slightly exotic little position in the portfolio — the one that makes dinner-party conversation more interesting than 'more index fund, again, for the love of all that is holy' — without letting it anywhere near the serious money. The serious money is off being sensible in the broad ETFs and the boring compounders, exactly where it belongs. LDGG is the fun money, the forward-looking money, the 'I'm not dead inside and I like a bit of technological frontier' money. Kept small, held long term, and enjoyed thoroughly. Long term is a good term, after all — especially for the stuff you're not entirely sure about yet, because it gets time to prove itself one way or the other.
── More RDDT: The Internet's Town Hall, and My Guiltiest Pleasure ──
Then there's Reddit (RDDT), and I make no apologies for how much I enjoy topping this one up. It's the internet's town hall — the place where every niche, every hobby, every slightly unhinged community on the planet goes to argue, celebrate, commiserate and, increasingly, to search for actual answers instead of wading through a page full of adverts and SEO sludge. And here's the genuinely clever bit I keep coming back to: Reddit has quietly become one of the places people go to find real human opinions, and on top of that it's been making a serious, credible push into the AI world, licensing its vast, irreplaceable trove of human conversation to the very companies building the big language models. It's an oddball with a moat, a community asset with an actual, growing business bolted on — and every time I buy a bit more, it makes me grin, because it's the rare holding that's simultaneously a sensible investment and a genuine joy to own.
Yes, it can be volatile. Yes, it'll occasionally do something that makes the whole market collectively roll its eyes. That's part of the charm. It's the weird, wonderful, endlessly-entertaining member of the portfolio, and I keep it sized accordingly — big enough to matter, small enough that its wobbles are funny rather than concerning. More Reddit today, because I like the company, I like the community, and I like the idea that somewhere on the internet, as I write this, a complete stranger is arguing passionately about whether topping up RDDT was a genius move or the ramblings of a madman. Both, probably. Off we go.
── More MCD: The Dependable Old Friend (With a Side of Fries) ──
And then, bless it, there's McDonald's (MCD) — the dependable old friend of the portfolio, the one I keep coming back to because it never, ever lets me down. Here's a company that has spent decades turning fried potatoes into a near-indestructible financial fortress: a real-estate empire hiding inside a burger chain, a franchise model that means other people pay for the restaurants while MCD collects the rent, an extraordinary global brand, and a dividend with a record so reliably boring it could put a pensioner to sleep in the best possible way. Big burgers, bigger dividends, biggest moat this side of the Atlantic. It's the financial equivalent of comfort food, and on a week where I've also bought a shiny new blockchain toy and topped up the internet's greatest argument machine, a big warm slice of McDonald's is exactly the grounding the basket needed.
The nice thing about owning the dependable ones is that they let you invest with confidence in the fun ones. Every pound compounding away inside McDonald's — or Microsoft, or the broad index funds, or the insurance stalwart I added just last week — is a pound that quietly buys me the freedom to have a little LDGG and a little more Reddit without my blood pressure noticing. That's the whole architecture of a portfolio that stays fun for decades: boring foundations, exciting decorations. Loads of the former, just enough of the latter to keep it interesting. And today's top-up slots perfectly into that plan, which is why I'm grinning as I write it.
── Off We Go: The Whole Point, Properly ──
So there it is — one shiny new blockchain ETF, a bit more of the internet's favourite argument club, and a reassuring helping of golden-arches dependability, all bought on the same sunny morning, all with exactly the same lazy confidence. Long term is a good term. It really is, and the longer I do this the more certain I am that the winners in this game aren't the cleverest or the fastest or the best at guessing which way the market's going to twitch tomorrow. They're the ones who keep turning up, keep buying the good stuff in sensible amounts, keep a little room for a bit of fun, and then — the crucial, marvellously boring bit — they leave it all alone and let time do the heavy lifting. That's me, that's this top-up, and that's the whole website in a nutshell. Oh yes, off we go!
As ever, the fine print that keeps me honest: this is what I bought with my own money in my own SIPP — it is not advice, and LDGG, Reddit and McDonald's, like every investment, can go down as well as up. The blockchain theme in particular is genuinely volatile territory, so if you're remotely tempted to follow me into LDGG, please do it with money you can genuinely afford to lose, and please do your own research first. I'm not suggesting any of this is right for you; it's right for me because it's fun, it's sized sensibly, and I intend to hold it for a very, very long time. Buy less crap, invest the difference, give it time. Invest. Wait. Repeat. Off we go, and happy days.