What’s up everybody, welcome to another monthly update of my stock-market portfolio. If you’re new here, this is where I share my moves in the stock and Forex markets. This started as a trading blog, but honestly, trading is a fickle beast.
I took a step away for a bit, and just couldn’t get my performance back when I got back to it. So instead of slowly bleeding my account dry, I decided to take a take another break. This time, to rethink my game plan.
I haven’t gotten to a place where I’m happy with my strategy again yet, unfortunately. I’m working on it, though, and I think I’m getting close. I’d love for this to be more about trading again, so stay tuned for that.
Meanwhile…
In the meantime, though, I didn’t want to be out of the markets, so I’ve created a portfolio in the stock market consisting of 18 ETFs. ETF stands for Exchange-Traded Fund, and they’re essentially groups of stocks within a given category/industry/sector etc.
I wanted the portfolio to be in a diverse groups of industries — some so that it can grow steadily when times are good, some so that it doesn’t suffer too much when times are bad, and some for the far-future that will hopefully produce outsized returns in several years. A few examples of the sectors that the fund consists of are:
- Healthcare
- Consumer Staples (toothpaste, deodorant etc.)
- Consumer Leisure & Entertainment
- Real Estate
- Semiconductors
- Self-Driving Cars
I gave some thought into how risky I wanted the portfolio to be, and gave each ETF a percentage of the portfolio based on that. And when I add to it, I do so on the basis of maintaining those percentages. If you want more information about the portfolio overall, check out this page.
So far, the fund has been performing as I’d hoped — Read on to learn more.
Recent Performance
Since the beginning of the year, like I said, it’s performing pretty much exactly as I’m expecting. The market has been down, but my portfolio is at roughly break-even. Technically, it is down — but it’s only down a little under 2% while the S&P and DOW are down almost 5% and 4% respectively.
Month over month, the performance looks a little bleaker, but nothing to actually worry about. The portfolio ended the month ~1.5% under where it started, which isn’t too far behind the S&P which ended the month with a loss of just under a percent. That said, it outperformed the DOW pretty significantly which lost over 3%.
I update the portfolio every three months — January, April, July and October — so I just added more to it last month. The day I did though was literally the day before the S&P dropped about 6%. I watched literally my entire investment for the quarter disappear overnight. I held my resolve, though, and now I’m up that much more.
And truthfully, if you’ve been following closely, that means the day I did invest was after some pretty strong downward movement, and after a pretty sharp drop itself. I’m following the plan and holding for the long haul, though, so the plan is to execute it regardless of what’s going on. Prices being down are, really, just better buying opportunities.
Overall Performance
Since I started the portfolio in July of 2022 (using Schwab’s calculation), it’s up 25% — which is admittedly lagging the market overall, but how much depends on which market you use. I’m about 20 points behind the S&P which has gained 45% in the same time period; but I’m a little closer to the DOW, which has gained 31%.
Like I said, though, I’ve got several goals for this portfolio — some of them several years out — so lagging the market right now is okay with me. Plus, over the last couple months when the market has been down, I’ve been outperforming it; which was one of the goals. So all-in-all, I feel like I’m in a good place.
Right now, I’ve got myself on a quarterly schedule to add dollars to this stock-market portfolio; so I’m not making any updates right now. The next time will be in early-July. Hopefully that time I don’t do so right before a big dip like I did last month 😅.
Either way, I’ll be checking in again at the beginning of June, so stay tuned for that! Are any of you holding on to long-term portfolios? Let me know in the comments how yours is doing. Thanks for reading!