I bought more VUAG. Again. In the same SIPP. On the same day. Someone stage an intervention.
I'm half joking, but only half. Look: I already wrote about topping up VUAG in my SIPP earlier this week. I wrote about the weekly ritual. I wrote about pound-cost averaging and the behavioural magic of automation and why the S&P 500 at seven basis points is the closest thing to a free lunch an investor can get. And then — what did I do? I logged back into Trading 212 and bought more. Not because anything changed. Not because there was a dip. Not because I had a new insight. Simply because I had a bit more capital sitting in the account and the alternative — letting it sit in cash earning nothing while I waited for a 'better' entry point — felt dumber than buying more of the thing I already believe in at whatever price Mr Market was offering.
And that, right there, is the point. The 'addiction' joke contains a truth. The compulsion to buy more VUAG is not a bug in my psychology — it's a feature. The alternative to this 'addiction' is the far more dangerous habit of sitting on cash, waiting, second-guessing, trying to time entries, and ending up with a pile of uninvested money that inflation quietly erodes while I wait for a pullback that may never come. If I'm going to be addicted to anything as an investor, let it be the weekly ritual of buying a broad, cheap, diversified index fund inside a tax-efficient wrapper. There are far worse vices.
I should be honest about what's actually happening here, because from the outside it probably looks slightly unhinged to have multiple 'I bought more VUAG' posts appearing in the same week. The reality is that my SIPP receives contributions at different points during the week — some from regular transfers, some from ad-hoc top-ups, some from dividends landing as cash and needing to be redeployed. Each time cash appears, I have a choice: deploy it immediately into the core holding, or let it sit while I think about it. I used to think about it. Now I just deploy it. The result is that VUAG gets topped up multiple times in a single week — not because I'm frantically trading, but because cash arrives asynchronously and my default action is 'buy more VUAG'. It's not elegant, but it's effective.
The real story here is simpler than all the analysis. I've been investing long enough to know that the biggest risk to long-term returns isn't a market crash — it's me. My own behaviour. My own temptation to wait, to time, to outsmart, to tinker. The weekly VUAG top-up — or in this case the twice-weekly, or thrice-weekly, or however-many-times-cash-appears VUAG top-up — is my way of getting out of my own way. The less thinking involved, the better my returns have tended to be. If that looks like an addiction from the outside, I'll take it.
As always: this is what I did with my own money. Not a recommendation. All investing carries risk — you can lose money, and past performance doesn't predict future returns. The S&P 500 is concentrated in US equities and can go through prolonged periods of underperformance. Currency fluctuations between sterling and the dollar will affect your returns as a UK investor. If you find yourself buying VUAG five times a week, you might also be addicted — but at least you're in good company.