Investment Performance February 2009 (-9.94%)

This is an ongoing monthly update on how our equity investments are performing. Please see this background on the investment tool I developed and how I am using it to track our performance against a benchmark to measure our progress or lack thereof.

Its still a work in progress, any feedback is appreciated and may be incorporated into future monthly reports. The only equity investments not covered are:
1) my 401k which is invested in institutional index funds through my employer that I haven't found a tracking symbol for.
2) investments roughly worth less than $500, simply because I don't have the time and energy to keep up with them. I am thinking I will sell these off at some point and add the proceeds to my current investment portfolio because they are too much work to track.

Once we get settled in a bit more I will work on making this report more comprehensive.

February Highlights:

  • Another tough month for the market with our benchmark declining over 10%. We were able to just beat the benchmark this month, but I am sick of seeing red. How low could it go? I believe the market has finally gone overboard and overcorrected at this point. However our portfolio is still declining and it sucks.
  • Part of our better than average performance was the large holding of IBM stock which eaked out a small gain for the month. I am beginning to think I should sell some IBM stock and reallocate some of my investment into areas that have been beaten down.
  • Our investing pace has slowed down as we have intested most of our non-emegency fund cash. We have a few thousand left outside of our monthly cash flow that will be likely invested next month.

February 2009 Investment Report:

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Comments (4)


you're just as poorly off as the rest of America, you just haven't updated correctly. C'mon, when you bought the house, your net worth shoulda' dropped accordingly, unless you're changing your 2M criteria. Just pointing out a major flaw, and one more reason why blogs like yours are a dying breed...

You have way too many holdings for that small a portfolio, especially considering you have some funds mixed in there. While that does help limit risk a little (though not as much as people think), it really limits you on the upside more. Remember you need to gain much more in percentage terms than you lost just to break even and when markets come back you need to outperform in order to just break even (unless you are counting on markets returning to where they were, e.g. Dow at 14,000 in which case you're just dreaming).

Love the blog. Keep it coming I like to check once or twice a month see how you're doing. Not sure what the post from above from sam is talking about. If you buy a house your net worth doesn't drop. Instead of having liquid cash you now have a house worth what you paid. JD how does having many small investments hurt you on the upside? That doesn't have anything to do with that fact that if you loose 50% you need a 100% gain to get to even.

Used to read your updates regularly but due to lack of time not been as active of late but by chance picked up on it again through search query. Glad to see you still persisting with it as i used to keep a monthy asset register but with the dive in the UK stockmarket have not updated it for over 5 months as don't want to depress myself with the drop. Anyway keep up the good work and just bookmarked your site so i don't miss out on it again.

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A personal finance weblog of my journey to reach my goal of $2 million + the value of my primary residence.
Current Net Worth: $1,938,393

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