2016 YTD investment performance thread

[NW-Bound]

Quote:

Originally Posted by NW-Bound My return for 2016 is ... drum roll please... 8.9%. At 59% stock, 36% cash, and a bitty bit of bond, I trailed Wellington which is at 11.2%. If I held 60% of VTI (total stock) which returns 11.6% and 40% of BND (total bond) at 2.5% and never rebalanced during the year, I would have 8%...

Quote:

Originally Posted by Cobra9777 ...Benchmark is a 60/40 mix of VTI/BND, which was up 8.7%...

The above caught my attention, so I double-checked my numbers. Apparently, I looked up the performance of these ETFs too early on Dec 30th, and not all dividends were included in the numbers. My portfolio had some late dividends too, but these were not significant.

So, I looked it up again. According to Morningstar, VTI return was 12.68%, and BND return was 2.57%. The 60/40 blend with no mid-year rebalancing would have a return of 8.64%. My earlier number was too low, and missed by 0.64%. That minuscule 0.64% is important nowadays when CDs are paying a meager 1%.

My active investing barely matched that benchmark. It's nothing to brag about, although I held a lot of cash instead of bonds.

[pb4uski]

Quote:

Originally Posted by redduck Whoops, let's make that 7.87% for my entire portfolio.

That sounds more reasonable...I thought that you might be cherry picking for a moment there!

[syd03]

Little late to the party, only now sat down and figured this out. 9.0% for 2016. 46 stock/27 cash/23 bond/4 REIT

Interesting thread, in that at least for last year it doesn't seem there were particularly large swings in returns from one portfolio to the next relative to riskiness of allocations. I was expecting to see a bit more

[audreyh1]

I think that's because certain equity asset classes did far better than others in 2016. If you had a large position in international it hurt. If you had a big chunk in large cap US value, it helped a lot, as did US small cap exposure. So the underlying equity AA made a big difference.

Here is the latest Callan Periodic Table of annual asset class performance which includes 2016.

[sengsational]

Here is an article about how there is a tendency to compare your personal rate of return against the S&P 500, but that's "one half of one asset class". The suggestion is to compare with a world index, diluted by your bond allocation. If you look-up your bond allocation the figure you find is what you "should" be comparing your return to.

With the S&P coming in at 11.96% and the MSCI All Country World Index 8.48%, it makes it a bit easier (this year anyway), to compare to the world index.

2016: For me 6.8%, so about 0.8% above this benchmark.