{"id":1230,"date":"2014-01-26T00:24:42","date_gmt":"2014-01-26T05:24:42","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.holypotato.net\/?p=1230"},"modified":"2015-08-05T20:26:50","modified_gmt":"2015-08-06T01:26:50","slug":"2013-active-investing-update","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.holypotato.net\/?p=1230","title":{"rendered":"2013 Active Investing Update"},"content":{"rendered":"

A quick update to my 2013 active investing summary<\/a>. Because Michael James put together a neat graph of his investing history<\/a>, I thought I should make one as well. I don’t have as much history as he does (and I didn’t have a year so positive I needed drawing tools to break the line) so it’s not quite as impressive. My benchmark is a 50\/50 mix of the Canadian and S&P500 e-series funds (all my rest-of-world exposure comes in through the passive portfolio). Like him, I had losses a bit worse than the benchmark in 2008, snapped back very strong in 2009, and lost a bit more in 2011. At this point you may notice I’ve had three out-performing years, and three under-performing years. Except for the fact that the magnitude of the out-performing years was (much) higher than the losing ones, this would look very depressing. As it is, it looks much like a coin-toss. It’s quite possible that I have no skill and this was <\/em>a matter of luck. To defend against that I do <\/em>passively invest (my RRSP and now Blueberry’s RESP are totally indexed), and it’s the approach I recommend for everyone1<\/sup>.<\/p>\n

I also forgot to repeat my brief approach summary: I try to capture some of the benefits of a passive approach by trading as little as possible. In 2013, my equivalent MER from commission costs was 0.15% (this was helped along by the lack of savings while Wayfare was on mat leave for the first half of the year). Because I know that I am the easiest person to fool, savings from 2014 will go to the indexed portfolio (even though, as Wayfare pointed out, this is the equivalent of performance-chasing — I’m ok with that because I don’t have any buy ideas now anyway). <\/p>\n

\"A<\/p>\n

1. Well, practically everyone. Everyone who isn’t willing to take some accounting courses, read balance sheets and all the footnotes until 2 in the morning on a work night, or suffer through volatility and downturns — and call it fun all the while. Oh, and stuff their puny human emotions into a box and jettison it into space. So yeah, everyone.<\/small><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A quick update to my 2013 active investing summary. Because Michael James put together a neat graph of his investing history, I thought I should make one as well. I don’t have as much history as he does (and I didn’t have a year so positive I needed drawing tools to break the line) so […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[16],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.holypotato.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1230"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.holypotato.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.holypotato.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.holypotato.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.holypotato.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1230"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.holypotato.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1230\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.holypotato.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1230"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.holypotato.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1230"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.holypotato.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1230"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}