This is an ongoing monthly update on how our equity investments are performing. Please see this background on the investment tool I developed and how I am using it to track our performance against a benchmark to measure our progress or lack thereof.
The only equity investments not covered are:
1) my 401k which is invested in institutional index funds through my employer that I haven’t found a tracking symbol for.
2) investments roughly worth less than $500, simply because I don’t have the time and energy to keep up with them. I am thinking I will sell these off at some point and add the proceeds to my current investment portfolio because they are too much work to track.
February Highlights:
- Our investment performance performed very poorly compared to our benchmark (2.25% vs 3.44%). This pretty much offset the very favorable comparisons last month where we beat our benchmark by over 1%.
- I finally figured out how to increase our investment in Fairfax Financial. Our Vanguard brokerage account would no longer allow us to purchase shares online (as Fairfax has now gone to Pink Sheets after delisting from NYSE). However our Sharebuilder accounts are still able to purchase the shares online.
- Our retirement account contributions are above normal this month to ensure we max out our 2009 contributions.
- Otherwise our portfolio was very quiet. We only added our regular monthly contributions to our Roth IRAs, received and reinvested some dividends.
- Our recent monthly returns were: Jan 09 -4.98%, Feb -9.94%, Mar +8.45%, Apr +10.88%, May +4.65%, Jun +0.89%, Jul +9.94%, Aug +4.36%, Sept 3.15%, Oct -2.34%, Nov +5.83%, Dec +1.85%, Jan ‘10 -2.34%, Feb +2.25%…..
February 2010 Investment Report:
