Investment Performance January 2009(-4.98%)

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.

Its still a work in progress, any feedback is appreciated and may be incorporated into future monthly reports. 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.

Once we get settled in a bit more I will work on making this report more comprehensive.

January Highlights:

Another tough month for the market with our benchmark declining over 8%. However our portfolio decline was just under 5% so we signficantly beat our benchmark! Yes - at least that is something to feel pretty good about.

• Part of our better than average performance was the large holding of IBM stock which rose signficantly after it reported quarterly earnings.
• We also made several investments this month including $4,100 in our KBW banking index etf (KBE), $2,600 in the SPDR Healthcare as part of our tax harvesting plans from last month, and $1,700 in Rohm & Haas in an arbitrage opportunity that does not look nearly attractive now as it did a few weeks ago, but still has a decent possibility of working out.
• We also contributed $1,400 to our Roth & SEP IRAs. Regular contributions to these accounts are going to become much more difficult with the additional cash flow impacts from our new mortgage/living expenses.
• I suspect going forward we will be investing less in our taxable stock investments and concentrating on maintaining our Roth IRA contributions at least till our cash flow improves.
• Right now a new priority is to rebuild our cash reserves.

January 2009 Investment Report:

Read more of Investment Performance January 2009(-4.98%)…