Happy New Year everyone!
Been a while since I posted these basic performance plots of SPY and AGG.
A look back at SPY shows lots of volatility and it just eked a small gain ...
Ditto for AGG ...
Both are just under their 200 day averages.
Personally, my last trade was on January 15 picking up more BAC. I held tight all year, even in August. Acting more like a buy-and-hold investor. Hopefully, I did not disappoint Flack and Junkster.
It was a pretty lame year for my portfolio, off 9% ...
Equities, largest to smallest: BAC down 5%, AIG up 12%, OAK down 4%, HCP down 8%, and AA down a massive 37%.
Weighted, my equities took my portfolio down about 6%.
The rest of the pain came from my funds.
Funds, largest to smallest: FAAFX down 15% (it sadly remains my Great Pumpkin fund), DODGX down 5%, SIGIX down 4% (about 12% better than its peers), and DODBX down 3%.
Hoping you and yours (and me and mine) a more prosperous 2016!
c
Comments
PRBLX, FLPSX, and GLRBX down a half-percent or a bit more, Yackts down >5%, FREAX and FRIFX up 2-3%, FOSFX up 8+% (recently replacing OAKIX, down almost 4%), and DSENX, the majority of my nut, up >4%, as was PDI, though somehow I have missed the latter. The nervous retiree has not yet aggregated these results.
k, edited to add that Fido Fullview shows -2% for the year. Gah. I guess part of that was withdrawal to live on. Almost 1% of it was totally speculative fool bets I made in oil and pharma. Greed, man.
One thing that seems to have tripped investors in 2015 were the so-called allocation or balanced funds. Some of them looked relatively good based on prior bull year returns simply because they used higher effective equity-correlated beta exposure (including bonds that behaved like equities) even if the overall bond/equity ratios were the same as peers. Fund managers "cheat" that way. The tide went out in 2015 exposing many of them to losses bigger than their peers.
This exposes a problem in using fund ratings or statistics for selecting funds including the metrics on this site. They don't really tell you qualitatively how they got there and two funds may have arrived at the same ranking by very different routes. One might do much worse than other when market conditions change. So how do you pick?
Perhaps, the sleeve system that I have been reading here from @Old_Skeet will reduce that execution/strategy risk even if at the expense of some returns except in bull cycles when all of them will likely eventually catch up. I don't know enough to be sure and it seems like an awful lot of funds to hold/manage.
The alternative is to understand the fund strategy and see if the assumptions of market conditions that the fund returns are based on changes but that is hard.
Ditto.
Not gonna take today's swoon as a forecast
c
Thank you. Hmmm.
Yep, certainly if you need to sell.
But, glancing over some notable funds (thru Nov anyway), I'm in good company ...
PIMCO ALL ASSET ALL AUTHORITY INST (PAUIX) -13.5
T ROWE PRICE NEW ERA (PRNEX) -12.9
BERWYN CORNERSTONE (BERCX) -12.8
THIRD AVENUE INTERNATIONAL VALUE INST (TAVIX) -12.8
YACKTMAN SPECIAL OPPORTUNITIES INST (YASLX) -12.7
FPA CAPITAL (FPPTX) -12.3
AQR FUNDS: AQR RISK PARITY II HV I (QRHIX) -12.2
GABELLI VALUE 25 A (GABVX) -11.4
GREENLEAF INCOME GROWTH (GIGFX) -11.3
DODGE & COX INTERNATIONAL STOCK (DODFX) -11.2
FRANKLIN INCOME A (FKINX) -10.7
JANUS CONTRARIAN D (JACNX) -10.5
WADDELL & REED ADVISORS HIGH INCOME A (UNHIX) -10.5
PIMCO ALL ASSET INST (PAAIX) -10
FORUM FUNDS: BECK MACK & OLIVER PARTNERS (BMPEX) -9.8
ARIEL FOCUS INV (ARFFX) -9.7
IVY ASSET STRATEGY C (WASCX) -9.4
BRIDGEWAY ULTRA-SMALL COMPANY (BRUSX) -9
It was a lame year.
Break, break.
Yes, backward-looking performance-based metrics have their limitations, indeed.
c
As of 10:30 pm central coast time, Lipper has still not dropped monthly data through December.
Hopefully, tomorrow and will update soonest.
c
Regards,
Ted
PRHSX: 12.98%
FBTCX: 10.22%
QQQ 9.45%
PFF: 4.22%
SPY: 1.25%
I recall you were going to divest your equity holdings earlier in 2015.
Based upon your numbers, you have 20% in each of the above holdings for your total investment portfolio, eh?
Take care,
Catch
OSMYX 15.6%
MSEQX 11.9%
FBTIX 11.4%
PJP 11%
CMTFX 10.5%
POGRX 6.1%
A few stocks did ok, but my two MLP funds did a major drag on equity portfolio, since these funds were down over 30%. Im down about 6% on equity side, but my 35% bond and cash allocation saved my taxable portfolio, since I have individual bonds that did not fluctuate. Basically Im down about 4% for year. Since I regularly take money out of taxable portfolio, that equals my distribution level, so basically flat for year. I consider that a win for 2015 considering how it could have been had I taken out from equities.
I noticed that you are invested in FBTCX. I believe this is the advisory form of FBIOX Why do you use this fund when FBIOX is less expensive and has a better performance record?
print
I think it was Ted who holds FBCTX
prinx
Unless you were on the wrong/unlucky side of @Ted's picks for the year which also seems like an incredible outlier.
Yes, it is a paper loss but paper losses do have a nasty habit of damaging investment goals/time frames, the higher they get. That is the damage I was refering to especially with such a negative alpha.
I would have expected most diversified/balanced index portfolios to have returns somewhere between -4 and +1 depending on beta exposure (and luck) despite the ups and downs.
Hopefully, even a reversion to mean will give you outsized returns on the same investments if you stick with them. So wish you well in that regard going forward.
The specific problem with metrics isn't just that they are based on past performance but that they have no information about how the funds got there in any time period. To me the latter is a better predictor of what a fund might do in different market climates. Two baseball teams may have the same average at some point in the season but how they got there is a better predictor how they might do against any particular team than those metrics.
1 YR returns @ M*
Energy Limited Partnership ( M L P's ) -35.00
Diversified Emerging Mkts -15.71
Equity Precious Metals -23.69
http://news.morningstar.com/fund-category-returns/
Basket of Commodities
http://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.cfm?id=24392
Oilprice.com news
Market Movers in Energy
• Swift Energy Company, an independent oil and gas producer focusing on the Eagle Ford, became the 40th company to declare bankruptcy since the beginning of the oil price downturn.
.. Chesapeake Energy (NYSE: CHK), the second largest natural gas producer in the U.S., was downgraded by Raymond James due to low natural gas prices. The company has lost more than 75 percent of its value over the past year, although its share price jumped 10 percent on Monday (volatility anyone ? )
The instability in China adds to the growing body of evidence that the global economy is not faring well. Yet another way of looking at the problem is through trade activity. In 2015, container traffic at some of the busiest ports in the world grew at its slowest rate in a half decade. In fact, container traffic at the 30 largest ports actually shrank by 0.9 percent in the third quarter..Part of the problem is the strengthening U.S. dollar, .But tepid economic growth is raising concerns about the stability of the global economy.
http://oilprice.com/newsletters/free/opintel05012016
Divinity with my dividends.Opened small position today.
ETNMX
http://eventidefunds.com/news/eventide-launches-the-eventide-multi-asset-income-fund/
Elsewhere
Schwab expands commission-free E T F platform
Jan 5 2016, 12:12 ET | By: Stephen Alpher, SA News Editor
http://seekingalpha.com/news/3014066-schwab-expands-commission-free-etf-platform
With original members State Street (NYSE: STT), Guggenheim, Invesco’s (NYSE: IVZ) PowerShares, ETF Securities, U.S. Commodity Funds and Schwab’s own lineup of ETFs, OneSource now offers select E T Fs from 15 issuers on a commission-free basis. The entire list can be viewed here.
https://www.etftrends.com/2016/01/schwab-adds-six-deutsche-etfs-to-onesource-lineup/
Newly offered examples
JHMH (health)
https://etf.jhinvestments.com/etf/our-etfs/jhmh.htm
RVNU (muni rev bonds)
https://etfus.deutscheawm.com/US/EN/Product-Detail-Page/RVNUl
http://www.marketwatch.com/lazyportfolio
Of course, unbalanced portfolios or portfolios with higher beta exposures can go much outside that and such deviations are worth taking a look at or thinking about.
Edit: Sorry, I take my assertion back as "kept updated" given the S&P 500 returns there so I would subtract about 1-2% from those returns to get an idea of what happened to typical buy and hold portfolios.
Mine is certainly not a balanced portfolio ... heavy financials still.
Here's year end performance for the list of struggling funds I posted above ... click images to enlarge.
Most worse off than numbers through Nov.
Note too that all but PRNEX had absolute returns well below their peers for the year. And, all have been retracting from previous one year maximum for at least 7 months.
c