Investment Performance January 2012 (+4.03%)

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.

January Highlights:

January kicked off the year right with strong across the market gains. We posted a +4.03% increase in our portfolio compared to our VTI benchmark increase of 5.07%.
I've now been tracking our monthly investment performance for 3 years and should be able to perform some decent analysis about out investment performance, but I already know the net - our benchmark the Vanguard Total Stock Market Index has pretty consistently performed slightly better. More to come I hope when I have a chance to dig through the data.
January was a quiet month transaction wise after we executed some tax harvesting at the end or December. We only made a small additional investment in Fairfax Financial.
We also made our regular monthly investments in our Roth IRAs and Conocco Philips DRIP, and had some dividends and dividend reinvestments.
Our recent monthly returns were: Jan 09 -4.98%, Feb -9.94%, Mar +8.45%, Apr +10.88%, May +4.65%, Jun +0.89%, Jul +9.94%, Aug +4.36%, Sept 3.15%, Oct -2.34%, Nov +5.83%, Dec +1.85%, Jan '10 -2.34%, Feb +2.25%, Mar +5.88%, Apr +2.54%, May -8.13%, June -5.64%, July 6.17%. Aug -4.87%, Sept +8.48%, Oct 2.47%, Nov -0.96%, Dec +8.01%, Jan 2011 +2.06%, Feb 2.57%, Mar +0.15%, Apr +3.04%, May -1.56%, June -1.63%, July -2.71%, Aug -5.42%, Sept -7.06%, Oct +9.88%, Nov -0.39%, Dec +2.10%, Jan '12 +4.03%.....

January 2012 Investment Report:

Related in Stocks:

Investment Performance March 2012 (+2.35%) (Apr 18, 2012) 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 February 2012 (+4.68%) (Mar 21, 2012) 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...

How Well Has Our Investment Portfolio Performed? (Mar 02, 2012) I've now been closely tracking our investment portfolio on a monthly basis for over 3 years! Its been a lot of work and valuable for me personally as I can see the bigger picture each month. One realization that has...

Comments (1)

2Million, this is good insight and something I discovered awhile back in my portfolio. This is why I became a believer in low cost index investing. I just found that I wasn't able to consistently outperform the market with individual stocks.

Posted by BE @ BusyExecutiveMoneyBlog | February 17, 2012 9:21 AM