Category: Investment returns

In the 100+ investments that I can track in detail*, half a dozen made annualised returns of over 60% from 1/7/12 to 1/7/15.  In this post I’m going to examine these six investments in detail.

Under normal conditions, >60% p.a. returns can only come from active investments, not passive ones.  As such, these positions were all small – unfortunately, but sensibly.  But with such high returns, there are two questions I’m asking myself:

1. How sensible was my logic, with hindsight? Was this skill, or was it luck?
2. Should I have taken much bigger positions? Or would this have been just rank speculation?

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

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

A rare thing has just happened: Saturday is the 1st of the month, and my diary is clear.  So, before the July market prices have even cooled properly, I’ve updated my returns page here. The result?  In July I recovered most my June losses.  I should add that my June returns were about 0.5% worse than I first thought – though still not as bad as the markets I’m in.  So treat all these early numbers with caution.

There was pretty clear snapback in most markets, with Australia up over 4%, European-ex-UK, UK and USA equities all up about 2.4%, and fixed income up between 1-2% too.  I’d have been feeling pretty sour if I didn’t benefit from that.  No sourness here: I recovered about 2.3%  – exactly in line with the market returns.

My compound annual returns remain pleasingly high at 12% (since 1/1/13).  This feels a little too good to be true but then maybe I am more of a genius than I had realised (definitely not – Ed.).

 

One of the nice things about blogging about financial investing is that it make me think more carefully about my investing activity.  Being an analytical sort of person, I decided to take a good hard look at my returns in detail, and see what lessons I could draw from them.

For this post I’ve taken the portion of my portfolio which is readily trackable.  This isn’t my entire investment portfolio but it is the majority of it, and it performs in line with the overall portfolio.  This portion has been tracked in detail for many years, so it gives me an analytical data set that makes it very useful.

I’ve taken the investments which I had three years ago – on 1 July 2012 to be precise.  I have 114 investments in this dataset, ranging from tiny individual shareholdings of under £1000 to a hefty ETF exposure into IUKD (iShares’ yield-orientated FTSE-350 ETF).  By the end of the three year period, I had sold about half of these holdings. It is worth noting that my strategy and thinking has evolved significantly in the last three years; these days I would see less churn in the portfolio (and fewer small holdings).

I’ve then looked at what the average annual return that each investment obtained, over three years (from 1 July 2012 to 1 July 2015).  Returns include the gain in value as well as any dividend income.  This is a money-weighted calculation; if I tripled my exposure in 2014, then the 2014 returns will carry 3x the weight of the 2013 returns; if I sold the position on 1 Jan 2013 then the returns will be the six month returns (from 1 July ’12 to 1 Jan ’13), annualised. The actual calculation is done for me by my tracking software.

Continue reading “The anatomy of a portfolio’s returns” →