See also
Q: over any “12M window when my account has $1000+ in equities“, do I usually generate 5 ppa return?
A: yes. However, with my eqMufu, the end-to-end return for each fund is more accurate therefore more reliable.
Q: over a 5Y sliding window, do I usually generate 5 ppa return whenever my account has $1000 or more in equities?
A: IDK. harder to estimate.
Q: Why are so many people interested in a stock portfolio’s annual returns?
A: Because they want to compare it to a fixed-income asset!
— eq holdings… ought to be documented before we assess return rates
- small amount in FSM
- — SRS: total SGD 15k invested
- SIA
- DIVA
- — in U.S.
- USD 2k GS shares
- USD 20k in Roth401k target date fund
- USD 2.5k in eqMufu
- USD 10k in Rbh
— (edited) letter to .. Hi Junli, You asked: what’s my average return in my eq investments.
- My top mutual fund is from T.Rowe Price. Look at its performance: https://www.morningstar.com/funds/xnas/trbcx/performance
- One retirement fund was managed by Goldman Sachs. I don’t think the NAV has ever dipped below my initial amount (around 20k). Therefore, it’s a positive return end to end. If you ask about annualized returns, then I would say “I don’t care. I leave it to the fund manager.” Typically, U.S. fund managers use SP500 (or other indices) as benchmark. In those cases, long term annualized returns would be 4% to 8%, not negative. Negative return is always over a short window in the U.S.
- I have tiny ETF positions (in my brokerage account) and Reit positions (in brokerage and DBS accounts). End-to-end returns are positive so far.
- ^^ for these items, I leave my money entirely to the managers. I don’t monitor them.
- my own brokerage account (in US) shows a 30% return over the last 3 years, but a future year could easily hit a negative return. My wife has a SGD brokerage account…
- my Singapore mutual funds are each held for a few months, or longer (up to a few years). For example, if I hold a fund for 13 months, I may sell at a 10% profit. Most of the time (like 9 out of 10 times), I do sell at a profit. The profit ranges from 5% to 80%. Once a while, I liquidate a fund at a loss, where the loss ranges from -10% to -30% end to end. Therefore, overall return is surely positive across my equity mutual funds. My profit% or loss% is never an annualized number. It’s too time-consuming to calculate annualized returns.
- ^^ So almost all the items above are end-to-end positive. All’s well that ends well.
Some people ask me how much money I invested across all equities, and how much total profit so far. I once spent hours computing, and gave up.
Why did I gave up? The questions assumes we are a fund manager with a single platform, a sophisticated accounting system to keep track of money flows. In reality, my total “commitment” fluctuates too much and I have no such “tracking system”. I started at 10k, grew to 50k (or 100k?) and I took out most of it, before topping up again. For many years my commitment level was close to zero. So I don’t know (and don’t care about) the average commitment level. Profits are also hard to track.
Next time, I will give an answer based on my brokerage account over the last few years. I will say that when my account had more than $1000 value in equities, the typical return is xxx ppa