I shared part one of our Friday File with you this morning, when I took some time to dig into a nanocap idea being teased by Keith Schaefer, so part two will be a little more brief… just a few quick notes about things of interest this week, and some minor moves in the Real Money Portfolio.
But first, let me answer a question that has popped up a few times this week about how the portfolio has been performing. We have quite a few new members in the group, so although I do post trades and updates most weeks there are some folks who would like a higher altitude picture.
Some of that I can’t give you, but I do try to be as transparent as possible… so I’ve started adding in some of the annualized return numbers for my mutual fund/ETF positions to provide some context there (the data isn’t complete, which is why some cells are blank in that area).
And I can at least share with you my total return for everything as tallied by Personal Capital (which is not 100% accurate in performance tracking, but pretty close in my experience — if you want to track your portfolio similarly, I do recommend their free tools, particularly in aggregating data from lots of different accounts and providing some asset allocation analysis… and if you sign up for a free account with this link, yours truly will get paid for that referral, thanks!).
Right now, that tallies up with about a 3% gain for my portfolio year to date, versus about a 5.5% loss for the S&P 500 — so things are going quite well, though that’s certainly not a level of outperformance that I’m likely to consistently achieve, particularly if I keep hedging and maintaining a highish cash balance. It has been a good couple of years, I started sharing the details of the Real Money Portfolio in early 2017 and Personal Capital tallies my total return as being about 57% during that time, versus roughly 45% for the S&P 500. So I’m pleased to be beating the market by a bit, particularly because I’ve been able to do so even though I’ve been a bit nervous in recent years and have been hedging more and keeping more cash reserves, but we’ll see what the future holds — and, to be clear, there have ...