Category: Investment returns

A quick post to say Well Done to weenie (@QuietlySaving) for her Monkey Stock challenge.

The idea is simple: each competitor enters a ‘monkey’ portfolio of five randomly-chosen (ish) stocks in the FTSE-350. This starts in September 2015, and the competition runs – I think – for 12 months, with the winner being the portfolio that is worth the most at the end.  The notional starting portfolio is £500, so we are talking five £100 holdings here.

My portfolio is called ‘the B team’ and comprises:

BA. BAe
BAB Babcock Intl
BABS Bluecrest Allblue
BAG AG Barr
BARC Barclays

I am thrilled to say that I was first out of the blocks, I am currently number two in the ginormous leaderboard, and to cap it all I am currently, with two enormous weeks behind us, the leading ‘real money’ contestant.  Words fail me.

Fingers crossed for the next eleven-and-a-half months…

This is the third article examining the 100+ investments that I can track in detail*.  Four significant investments made annualised returns of -10% per year or more, between 1/7/12 to 1/7/15, with a fifth chunky investment proving nearly as bad.  In this post I’m going to examine these, my worst investments in this sample, in detail. (Other posts have examined the best six investments and the average performance).

Analysing investments is a study in risk.  Given that the investment portfolio here, which averaged around 10% per year, had 100 investments in it, you would expect a few investments to deliver negative returns.  So the key questions here are:

1. Was my original logic sound? It is possible that these investments might actually be ‘good’, but I am showing a loss in the 2012-2015 window – i.e. temporarily under water, but fundamentally sensible holdings.
2. Were these investments avoidable? Even if the original logic was sound, perhaps there were warning signs I could have heeded?
3. Did I trade in/out of these investments at the right time?

Let’s look at these five investments in no particular order.

Continue reading “Anatomy of a portfolio’s terrible returns” →

I started this blog barely three months ago, and no sooner have I started it than my portfolio has just seen two of the worst months since I started tracking it systematically over three years ago.  June saw my invested portfolio drop almost 4%; I had a partial rebound in July, but now August has seen me drop by 4.4%.  My annualised percentage over 2.5 years has dropped from 12% to 9.8%, my maximum drawdown (peak to trough) is now -6%, and my Sharpe ratio (a measure of return for a constant level of risk/volatility) has dropped from almost 2 to close to 1.  Maybe my new blog has jinxed the global markets….

… and if it has, maybe I should start another blog.

In fact I am pretty thrilled with August.  My invested portfolio is down 4.4%, yes, but in fact this is great news for two reasons.

Continue reading “What a mess this blog has got us into – my Aug ’15 investment returns” →