Over the last year I’ve, honestly, been struggling pretty hard with my trading. Objectively, I have had some successes, and things probably weren’t as bad as they felt; but every loss really affected me and I just no longer felt good buying and selling multiple times per week. I need a more consistent source of income so that I don’t live or die on each trade. I read multiple times that you shouldn’t trade for income in the beginning, but I thought I was better than that. I’m man enough to admit I’m not.
So, while I work on building other income streams, I’m planning on taking a step back from the day/swing trading and focus on my portfolio — these 18 ETFs and their given percentages. I only plan to add funds to the portfolio quarterly, so that’s when I’ll probably provide performance updates.
In an effort to always provide full disclosure, I also want to mention that I’m not really comfortable using actual numbers. So for now, I’m going to provide all of my numbers in percentages. Maybe things will change later.
The Portfolio
I made my initial buy of the ETFs in mid-July 2022, and my thought process behind them was to have a relatively well balanced portfolio that also had an eye toward the future. I also wanted to make sure that the portfolio didn’t suffer too badly in times of economic hardship. For a more detailed explanation, check out the Portfolio page.
Performance Update
The portfolio is up a decent amount, here’s how the numbers break down:
Overall, based on the quantity of each ETF that I have, my portfolio is only up 15.7% to date, which I’m happy with. The S&P is up 24% in the same time-frame for comparison, so I think I’m doing great.
I also feel I should let you all know that the reason a couple prices above have asterisks is because those ETFs split in July of 2023. They underwent a 3:1 split, so I divided my initial purchase price by 3 to reflect that. Given the number of shares that I now own, it gave a more accurate weighting to my calculations as well.
Overall for this time period, with a gain of 47%, The best performing ETF was PSI, the semiconductor basket. I’m not sure how (if at all) the split affected it’s gains, especially given my calculation reflects the split. The worst was the Utilities ETF, XLU, which lost 8% over the time-period.
Final Thoughts
Altogether, I’m happy with the performance. But truthfully, I’m not really sweating it one way or the other. I plan to hold this for the long haul, so even if it were to be performing worse than I wanted… I guess we’ll see if I have the conviction to hold if the whole thing starts losing money. Let’s hope it doesn’t come to that.
Thanks for reading! Let me know in the comments what your portfolio looks like, or if you have any questions about mine. I’m happy to help. As of right now I’m only updating my portfolio quarterly, so that may be all my posts are for the foreseeable future, so don’t forget to check back in a couple months to see how it’s going!