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RSSInvestment Performance March 2009 (+8.45%)
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.
March Highlights:
- March started out another tough month as the market declined close to 10% before recvoering and ending the month in positive territory - our benchmark and our portfolio showing the best returns since I started tracking our monthly return over a year ago.
- This is the 5th month in a row we have beat our benchmark. Its a good trend, but doesn't really say much yet. Our portfolio returned 8.45% vs our benchmark of 7.53%. I made a very dumb move try to harvest some tax losses and missed the upswing in the financial sector by selling Wells Fargo and not immediately buying into another investment as was my plan.
- We did add a new position in Fairfax Financial this month although a relatively small amount. I first started researching Fairfax when I found out it was one of two companies (the other Berkshire Hathaway) that obtained a sweet deal with USG on convertible securities. The more research I did the more I was interested in owning a part of this business.
March 2009 Investment Report:
Related in Stocks:
Year End Tax Harvesting (Dec 23, 2011) I always end up waiting until the last minute, and this year is no exception. I took a quick scan of my portfolio yesterday and decided to sell a couple holding that we had significant paper loss on to harvest...
Investment Performance November 2011 (-0.39%) (Dec 23, 2011) 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...
Investment Performance October 2011 (+9.88%) (Nov 21, 2011) 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...
Comments (3)
Wow, that's a lot of individual stocks and funds to track. You are diversified, but think of the time you have to spend researching, deciding when to buy/sell, and tallying up all these different securities. You may beat the benchmark on occasion, but does your portfolio have the same risk (volatility) as your benchmark? It's risk-adjusted return that really matters.
You have a baby on the way, a marriage to keep strong, a demanding job -- if I were you, I would focus my time on these truly important things, and make my investment portfolio a passive one with a few broad market, low-cost Vanguard index funds.
Posted by Financial Expat | April 2, 2009 8:03 AM
Financial Expat: Well, you're not him. Thankfully.
I also have diverging opinions about his portfolio but it doesn't take much logic to see if every single person went into index funds everyone of us would be lemmings waiting to jump off a cliff.
Posted by Muzie | April 3, 2009 4:30 PM
Be thankful you're out of WFC.
The articles I've been reading suggest that they may be exposed to another $120 billion in losses (http://www.ritholtz.com/blog/, Naked Capitalism, ZeroHedge, etc.)
Posted by Thisson | April 14, 2009 10:01 PM