Investment Performance April 2012 (-1.74%)

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.

April Highlights:

April was ugly. The market was down, but more significant is our portfolio performed much worse than our benchmark. We saw a -1.74% decline in our portfolio compared to our VTI benchmark decrease of -0.64%.
I've now been tracking our monthly investment performance for 4 years and recently posted an analysis of long term investment performance. I'm still mulling over what actions to take from the review, but likely will be moving more of our investments into Vanguard's Total Stock Market Index as a result. I still feel compelled to manage at least a portion of our portfolio as I view becoming an above average investor an important component to being financially free.
The only major investment we made in April was an additional investment in Genworth as I see the stock a compelling long term investment.
We 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%, Feb +4.68%, Mar +2.35%, Apr -1.74%.....

April 2012 Investment Report:

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Comments (3)

Do you mean May?

Posted by dave | June 2, 2012 11:39 PM

I wish. Im playing catch up and did get April out in a timely fashion. Im hoping May report will come out quicker and if I only lost -1.74% I would be ecstatic.

Posted by 2million | June 3, 2012 10:38 AM

2million, you're poised to hit 1 million soon if only the market would actually give returns in line with historical returns! The powers that be are trying to prevent it and I shall strike them down!

Posted by Steve | June 5, 2012 7:36 PM