One fundamental piece of investment advice everyone should follow is to be sure to diversify your holdings. The idea being that a bad year in one investment would not be a disaster for your portfolio.

Unfortunately, the opposite is also true. This year’s IFA accounts show an increase in stock investments of €2.15m to €14m.

If the organisation had been 100% invested in shares of FBD Holdings plc, as many suspect it would be, its stocks investments would have increased by €5.2m to €17m in the year ended March 2022.

In fact, the FBD investment accounts for only about one-third of the IFA’s financial market investments, with €5 million of the €14 million closing balance comprised of FBD shares, according to IFA National Treasurer Martin Stapleton.

Speaking of diversification, the IFA’s income from farmers has always been broken into “affiliation fees” and “European involvement fund levies.” The fees are membership subs, while the levies have been slightly more controversial in the past.

The 2022 accounts lumps both figures into a single line item “Membership Contributions” which totalled €9.46 million during the year.

The move comes after a request from the auditor, but the labelling of it as “member contributions” may be inaccurate, as the levies paid by beef and milk producers may not exclusively be collected from IFA members.