Questor: inflation is rising relentlessly and our Wealth Preserver portfolio has its work cut out to keep up

We in Britain are unlikely to be so lucky: the loss of value of the pound domestically – which is what the consumer prices index measures – will in our view be mirrored by a loss of its international value, as seen in the exchange rate. For this reason we can take some comfort in our exposure to other assets priced in dollars, especially our commodities.

That said, so far at least these investments have not helped our cause: falls in the prices of the commodities concerned have outweighed the benefit of their dollar denomination. Our basket of four commodities or shares in commodity producers has lost a collective 7.5pc.

However, we must expect these assets to be volatile and have protected ourselves by limiting their contribution to 10pc of the portfolio. Over the longer term, once weekly or monthly swings have evened out, we expect our commodities to keep pace with inflation at the very least and in all probability exceed it comfortably.

Another of our dollar-denominated assets is of course Bitcoin, added to the portfolio at the same time as gold and intended to act together with the metal as an “ancient and modern” double act whose value derives from scarcity of supply. But while gold has risen its digital equivalent has fallen – by 18.3pc in sterling terms.

Fortunately, we deliberately invested just 2.5pc of the portfolio in Bitcoin and the result is that the two assets together are virtually unchanged in their collective sterling value since purchase.

We also own one investment specifically designed to offer inflation-beating returns: our index-linked gilts. We put 12.5pc of the portfolio into these bonds – our largest single asset – in May and since then they have gained 4.4pc, although they have fallen quite sharply from a peak earlier this month.

Over the longer term, the way these bonds work tends to be that their price is driven not so much by the inflation rate in isolation as by the gap between inflation and interest rates.

Although the Bank of England has finally raised rates, at 0.25pc they are still extremely low relative to the CPI and the Bank will be wary of increasing them faster for fear of tipping businesses and households into insolvency. Hence the outlook for our gilts is positive.

The best performer among the other components of the portfolio is our collection of four “uncorrelated” assets, all investment trusts, which have gained 3.7pc in aggregate. Our eight stocks have risen by 3.2pc on average while our bond funds and property and infrastructure investment trusts are almost flat.

Overall the portfolio is 1.9pc to the good once income is included. Of course we have not been fully invested for anything like a year – the final assets were added only two months ago – so we shouldn’t read too much into this figure.

Read the latest Questor column on telegraph.co.uk every Sunday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday and Friday from 5am.

Read Questor’s rules of investment before you follow our tips.

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