I’ve created a spreadsheet to track Saul’s stock for 1 month. I set it equal weight. Its performance is amazing.
Date Saul stock SP500 Difference
5/15/2020 69.77% -12.20% 81.98%
6/9/2020 89.01% -0.73% 89.74%
6/11/2020 97.08% -3.67% 100.75%
6/18/2020 114.65% -3.90% 118.56%
6/23/2020 121.74% -3.08% 124.82%
Here’s the link to the tracker with real time quote:
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1d2WnucJ3BHy8ALSpHwWJ…
I respect anyone who’s retired and brave enough to let their livelihood depends on just few stocks.
Personally, I retired early at around 40 and I am also taking care of my elderly mom. I’ve decided to own hundreds of stocks. The benefit is that I don’t need to follow individual companies closely. It’s mostly bought and forget. I rarely make big change to the portfolio.
The expected return is SP500 + around 10%. So if the SP500 long term return is expected to be 10% per year, mine will be around 20% per year.
My 2020 YTD is: +17.56% while SP500 is negative -3.08%. My out performance related to SP500 is 20% so far. It’s matched my expectation.
Also as a supplemental income so I don’t have to sell the growth stocks, I also sell some deep out of money put options on stocks with high expected volatility but more likely to go side way or go up every month. The 17.56% return mentioned above doesn’t include the options income.
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Greetings!
Thank you Saul for this post (and the board of course) and all others for providing your real life examples.
I have been investing on my own since 2008 following a dividend growth strategy. After doing this for about 10 years, I reviewed my performance of the last decade to see what I could improve. I reached the conclusion that this strategy has worked reasonably well for me, especially during the 2008/2009 collapse and the recovery that followed as it put me into high quality stocks that were stable and financially strong (think mainly dividend aristocrats here). However, I also recognized that by holding on to this strategy I have been missing out on some of the best investment opportunities out there, simply because they didn’t have a long history of paying increasingly higher dividends over time. So I started to branch out a little. The brought me over to TMF. In my introduction post on the SA Meet and Greet board I explained what I was looking to learn and achieve and Raymond (KayakerRW) recommended this board to me. (Thanks you Raymond!). This was only about 2 weeks ago.
I started reading the posts and Saul’s knowledge base. It really hit home for me and I took a week off from work to study the knowledge base and many other posts. I feel like I have seen the light and I have learned more in the past 2 weeks then in my 10+ years of investing before. If only I had found this board sooner… So again, thank you all.
I took the step to swap 25% of my portfolio into hypergrowth stocks. What I did was sell the worst performing stocks in my portfolio (From a business ops viewpoint, not stock price performance) and invested those into a concentrated portfolio of “Saul” stocks. Most are mentioned here (E.g. CRWD, ZM, DDOG, AYX) and some aren’t (like Adyen). To be clear, I didn’t just buy stocks that were mentioned here because they were mentioned here. I used those as a starting point to read up on their earnings reports of the past quarters and look at their investor pitches etc. Just like Saul recommends going about your research. I really want to learn doing this myself with the benefit of the knowledge of this board. I have started positions and will add to them gradually over the next couple of weeks. So I didn’t invest all the proceeds of the 25% of my dividend growth portfolio at once, but rather spread my purchases out a bit.
So why am I mentioning this all? Well, I must admit that it feels really uncomfortable to buy these stocks after they have had such a run up over the past few months. Especially coming from a more value investing background where my focus was always on buying stocks when they their valuation was down. Kind of feels like you have missed the boat. And I have read the posts about this and I know you shouldn’t try to time the market, About how the valuation of these stocks is different, etc etc. But knowing it intellectually and actually doing it are two very different things. So these examples that you have provided here are really useful to me as they help my comfort level because it feels really weird buying these stocks at all time highs. So reading that many of you similar feelings and had similar experiences are very helpful. I hope that as I gain more confidence I can transfer more of my dividend growth portfolio into growth stocks. I am in my early 40s so while I do still have time, I also don’t want to waste precious compounding years.
I also hope that over time as I learn more I can contribute more to this board, rather than just reading it.
Thank you all for contributing and sharing you knowledge!
Jeroen
PS: I see the post got a bit long, apologies for that.
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Welcome onboard Jeroen and great introduction post! Nice to see a fellow Dutchie on these boards, enjoy the tons of wisdom that are shared here by some brilliant minds.
Greetings,
Paul