I made my first post here on Saul’s board 1 year ago, on 5/11/2017, board post #27702. http://discussion.fool.com/new-to-this-particular-board-32709814…
I see that the board is now up to 41277 posts as of 4:45 pm on 5/11/2018. In this past year I have made 636 posts (prior to this one) with varying degrees of value for each post. So, 636 of 13,575, for 4.7% of the posts on the board within the past year. That is probably a higher rate than would be warranted by my post to recommendation ratio. Thus, I will continue to stay cognizant of the overall value of the posts I make here on the board.
My returns for the past year, subsequent to discovering Saul’s board, have been nice. I am up 48.3% measuring from May 11, 2017, and since today is exactly a year, the time-weighted return (TWR) is the same as the CAGR. That rate of return is actually a bit less than the 53.5% CAGR measuring from Leap Day 2016 (which was close to a local market low). A big chunk of both return numbers is attributable to being an owner of NVDA shares.
Despite the “slowdown” that might be implied from simply looking at those 2 numbers, I am considerably more confident in my overall portfolio management skills and the level of diversity of my relatively concentrated portfolio today than I was 12 months ago. I am currently sitting at 20 non-trivially-sized positions, which may be a bit high in the opinion of some and would certainly be considered extremely low to others. Within the past year, I have finally started an IRA so that I can self-direct some tax-advantaged funds. Starting as of yesterday/today, I will be evaluating my portfolio performance based on the combined taxable and IRA portfolio. The step to start and fund an IRA has been influenced in part by discovering Saul’s board, including the clear language that beating the market is certainly not at all an unattainable feat.
While a good portion of my beating the market to-date (22% for me compared to 10.5% for the S&P500 measuring from my initial investments in October 2014) is due solely to the good fortune of having bought NVDA at $17.52 in 2014, I am guessing that more of my expected future gains will be a result of ever-improving portfolio management and being quick to jettison companies whose thesis isn’t working out to let that money be put to better use.
Thanks for having this board, Saul, and thanks to The Motley Fool for hosting it here on the free side of Fooldom.
-volfan84
long concentrated portfolios
long not believing the “conventional wisdom” that everyone should simply index