Dec 31, 2015

Cory Diary: 2015 Investment Performance

Every year I assess my performance and this year is no different. My wish is, this can be my sustainable alternate income that I can do alone as my own boss and hopefully supports my retirement meaningfully. I do not believe handing over my fund for investment purpose to friend, institution, insurance or unit trust. You have to learn to do it yourself be it passive or full time and no one will be more passionate than your own to make sure they are manage safely within your own parameters. I enjoy the experience and learning process.


There are 2 key metrics.

Year to Date Performance : Using Excel XIRR for total Stock Value on 31 Dec 2014 and 31 Dec 2015 (Closing Price). I like to use XIRR because it is simple to use and can also support assessing performance due to dividends, new entry and sales of my stock throughout the year at irregular time.

Whatever I earned in 2014 becomes part of my original capital in 2015. This mindset is important so that I won't lose them back to the market easily as the worst enemy is usually ourselves due to recklessness and overconfidence.

Life Investing Performance : XIRR again but across all trades and dividends throughout my investing lifetime. Is same as annualized performance multi-years. It becomes harder to understand as weight-age comes into play recent years as my Portfolio size grows much larger due to capital injections which skew the result towards recent years performances.

Both metrics do not include idle cash in the banks as I do not fully invest my capital. My intention is to measure my investing skill in counters traded in SG Equity which includes Bond and Preference Share. Therefore exclude Fixed Deposits, Pension, CPF, Insurance, US Stocks and Property.


Results





2015 XIRR : - 5.17% including dividends. If we use last day closing price of each year, STI is down -14.34% excluding dividends. Dividends for 2015 collected is $31,169.

Divested M1, Saizen Reit, Challenger, Marco Polo Marine, CMT Reit, Semb Corp Industrial, Lum Chang and Boustead. I did well in getting out from Semb Corp industrial and Marco Polo in the early part of the year. Unfortunately I was a little early on  Saizen Reit as I would have registered some gains due to the takeover. Bad luck I guess. I am a little late on M1 and have to cut loss on it. Missing out on transportation sector is a mistake too. And relative to my portfolio size, my dividends can be better.

What I am please about this year is my return to Bank stock and more Reits. Avoided shipping and commodity stocks. Expanded my Bond size which will provide added stability though will lower my potential returns. Will emerge with 17 main counters in 2016 which I feel is about right and near my bandwidth limits of 20.

Multi-Year XIRR : +6.51% (across 12 years. Total Dividends collected $147,829 ). Annualized return has come down due to the largest portfolio size accumulated into year 2015 and due to lower 2014 returns. 2015 portfolio is roughly 7.5 times larger than 2008 Global Financial Crisis period. I also found out despite the outsize portfolio of 2015, the absolute loss is lesser than 2008.


2016 Strategy

More Capital Injection, Add Transportation Stocks, More Financial Stocks. More dividends focus.
Will need to re-look as it goes. The key is staying nimble.

Cory
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