Investment 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%.
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:

Chairmen Letters to Shareholders (Mar 09, 2014) Its that time of year again --the close of fiscal years means an overload of annual reports including Letters to Shareholders. Two annual letters that I read each year are those from Berkshire Hathaway (Warren Buffet) and Fairfax Financial (Prem...

Investment Performance January 2014 (-2.94%) (Feb 23, 2014) January 2014 Investment Report: January Highlights: January was a bad way to start out the year, but our portfolio performed slightly better thank our benchmark (-2.94% vs -3.17%). We made our regular monthly investments in our Roth IRAs, and some...

Investment Performance December 2013 (+2.20%) (Jan 10, 2014) December 2013 Investment Report: December Highlights: December was another subpar for us as our portfolio performed poorly compared to our benchmark (+2.20% vs +2.58%). We made our regular monthly investments in our Roth IRAs, and some dividends & dividend reinvestments....

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