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:

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 (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