What did you buy? What might you buy??

deal_with_singh wrote: ↑My returns (Approx numbers):
*I started investing in 08.
2008 - 15%
2009 - 120%
2010 - 12%
2011 - 15%
2012 - 5%
2013 - 50% (This amount is after my losses of as much as 75% in my gold sector investments)

So yes 5/6 years I have beaten the market, so yes in the long run I am beating the market.

TSX Average Returns:
2008 - (35.5)%
2009 - 30.7
2010 - 14.7
2011 - (11.1)%
2012 - 4.0%

The numbers from above are from: http://www.forecast-chart.com/historica ... osite.html

So yes, the only year I've lost to the market is 2010 and essentially matched market returns in 2012.

And what's the 'risk' side of your portfolio? Anyone can leverage up (or buy high-beta names) in a bull market and out-perform the index. But in bear markets, they generally will see very large losses.

deal_with_singh wrote: ↑My returns (Approx numbers):
*I started investing in 08.
2008 - 15%
2009 - 120%
2010 - 12%
2011 - 15%
2012 - 5%
2013 - 50% (This amount is after my losses of as much as 75% in my gold sector investments)

So yes 5/6 years I have beaten the market, so yes in the long run I am beating the market.

TSX Average Returns:
2008 - (35.5)%
2009 - 30.7
2010 - 14.7
2011 - (11.1)%
2012 - 4.0%

The numbers from above are from: http://www.forecast-chart.com/historica ... osite.html

So yes, the only year I've lost to the market is 2010 and essentially matched market returns in 2012.

A) People tend to overestimate their gains and underestimate their losses, but even if you're 100% correct, beating the market 5/6 years is not a large enough sample size. I can win a coin flip 5 out of 6 times, does that make me a great coin flipper or just lucky?

B) If anyone can beat the market consistently, why don't these Hedge Fund Managers who make many millions a year with the smartest people from the best schools working for them beat the market on a consistent basis after fees? All I'm saying is that the best plan for most people is just consistently throw the same money into an index fund every month. Less stress, less risk and odds are you'll have better returns.

Vitalogy80 wrote: ↑Find me a study showing Active Investing beats Passive Investing...people always claim "buy low, sell high", but thats not what they actually do. Instead they double down on bad stocks thinking they're buying low, but instead they're just trying to catch a falling knife. It's easy to say leave emotion out of it and have a plan, but most don't do that or the plan goes out the window at a certain point.

Regarding active investing versus passive investing... Check out this award winning white paper on volatility. It's not really investing per se, but it shows how being active beats the market. I've been successfully using it for years. http://www.naaim.org/wp-content/uploads ... Cooper.pdf

Another test you can do yourself is backtesting / building any active investing portfolio on portfolio123.com. The full membership costs $1,500 / year but you have a free trial for 2 weeks, full access. There are several pre-built models that were refined overtime. Backtest dates from 1999, which involves 2 nice recent crashes. Annual performance ranges from 15% to 35%. So that beats the market. You can see every single trade opened / closed on the last 14 years and receive notifications on buy / sell orders for those portfolio.

The fact that most people cannot leave emotions out doesn't mean "it doesn't work". It works if they follow their plan, period. Change the rule in the middle, and it won't work. If people cannot beat the market because they change the rule during the game, then it's a different issue - the plan remains good, they were not good players.

About doubling down on bad stocks... There are fundamentals and TA to help one support their analysis. How many people know / do that? Buying random is not part of the game either.

Lots of fund managers receive commissions on products included in their portfolio. So beating the market is not their first interest. Making money for their company and for themselves is.

I agree that ETF passive investing fits most people that doesn't understand fundamentals / TA. I can even see it as a challenge for them, as it's too tempting to bail during a crash, since they don't understand it anyway. But it doesn't take a super-star to beat the market, specially considering how much information is available nowadays for one to learn. That's easy to build. The hard part is temperament. No course for that.

Rod

Mark77 wrote: ↑And what's the 'risk' side of your portfolio? Anyone can leverage up (or buy high-beta names) in a bull market and out-perform the index. But in bear markets, they generally will see very large losses.

Basically I try to find stocks I think are highly under valued and make my investments that way

This year for example from my portfolio, key winners...

Citigroup, up from $20s/30s to $53
Ford, up from $10.xx to $17 (sold at $17.20 or a day or two before their last earnings)
Bombardier, up from $3.30 (average purchase price) to $5

The above I've flipped many times as I have many other stocks

Key losers:
Iam Gold - down from $15 to 5
Kinross gold - down from $11 to $5
Barrick Gold - Down from $30 to $17


As I said, I simply invest in what I find undervalued. Last year the big one was financials; this years big one will be the gold miners.

deal_with_singh wrote: ↑Basically I try to find stocks I think are highly under valued and make my investments that way

This year for example from my portfolio, key winners...

Citigroup, up from $20s/30s to $53
Ford, up from $10.xx to $17 (sold at $17.20 or a day or two before their last earnings)
Bombardier, up from $3.30 (average purchase price) to $5

The above I've flipped many times as I have many other stocks

Key losers:
Iam Gold - down from $15 to 5
Kinross gold - down from $11 to $5
Barrick Gold - Down from $30 to $17


As I said, I simply invest in what I find undervalued. Last year the big one was financials; this years big one will be the gold miners.

u wot m8

deal_with_singh wrote: ↑this years big one will be the gold miners.

Issue here is when will they recover?
Don't want to miss that train.
I was already able to profit from IMG, .

Vitalogy80 wrote: ↑A) People tend to overestimate their gains and underestimate their losses, but even if you're 100% correct, beating the market 5/6 years is not a large enough sample size. I can win a coin flip 5 out of 6 times, does that make me a great coin flipper or just lucky?

B) If anyone can beat the market consistently, why don't these Hedge Fund Managers who make many millions a year with the smartest people from the best schools working for them beat the market on a consistent basis after fees? All I'm saying is that the best plan for most people is just consistently throw the same money into an index fund every month. Less stress, less risk and odds are you'll have better returns.

Well, to be fair, just a few of my opinions: intelligence isn't correlated with investment results (honestly; I believe that the more intelligent an individual believes they are, the worse they will perform. Find me somebody who believes that they are intelligent and I will show you poor investment results) and fund managers with billions of dollars to deploy will find it impossible to do better than a nobody like myself with only a few bucks; fees just make it even tougher for the retail investor. However, having said that, even though it's possible to beat an index, it isn't common to find an individual with the personality to be able to do so. Ultimately, the end result is the same, that most individuals are better off throwing regular money into an index.

As an unrelated aside, some posters know that I buy stock in a business once every 3-4 years or so. I've never owned more than 6 stocks at one time. Ever. I've held 2 stocks in my 6 stock portfolio for the full 15 years. Needless to say, my costs are low and my churn is probably lower than anybody around. I don't subscribe to conventional diversification, asset allocation or re-balancing. After giving some thought to those aforementioned 3 ideas espoused by the investment community I have arrived at the conclusion that they are extremely financially destructive. Any one of these ideas would destroy a portfolio let alone employing all 3. So I avoid them all. My opinion only.

My portfolio is well characterized by Warren Buffett's 1990 quote: "Lethargy bordering on sloth remains the cornerstone of our investment style: This year we neither bought nor sold a share of five of our six major holdings." In my particular case it would be six of my only holdings.

The following is a snapshot of my TDW portfolio on 11-July:
https://docs.google.com/file/d/0Bwb1PD4 ... sp=sharing

The following is a snapshot on 3-Aug:
https://docs.google.com/file/d/0Bwb1PD4 ... sp=sharing

Basically in 3 weeks, the portfolio, with absolutely no activity, went from $1.247m to $1.275m which is a ridiculous increase of 2.2%. My YTD is over 20%. Prices continue to climb without reason. This is why I say that there is absolutely nothing for me to buy in the U.S. market right now. This is where individuals make mistakes that destroy their performance: they buy during bull markets and they sell during bear markets. Bull markets are where the risks are the greatest. They should be doing absolutely nothing.

If an individual has the temperament to do the opposite, then they will do quite well over the long term (assuming that they are able to evaluate the strength of a business properly). But I have yet to know anybody able to do this so I must assume that they are rare.

I don't care about what the market does as long as my finances improve. So "beating the stock market" is an irrelevant goal for me as it should be for most people. We have actual financial goals that truly matter to us, and these goals are most effectively achieved if we completely ignore the desire to "beat the market". Most people who become obsessed with "beating the market" not only will lose sight of these goals, but will also fail miserably. I don't even know if I "beat the market" YTD or not. Do I care? Not in the least.

Rickson9 wrote: ↑This is where individuals make mistakes that destroy their performance: they buy during bull markets and they sell during bear markets. Bull markets are where the risks are the greatest. They should be doing absolutely nothing.

Now's the time to put all your doughs in gold miners and wait... and wait... but WAIT!! Who's willing to bet their shirt when it is collapsing? Need the right temperament.
[BTW, I'm just a starter but you should park your cash somewhere to get some interests, even if it's very little interests. If it's CAD, park it in TDB8150, .]

Mods: This whole thread is going south way off topic.

devilkidjin wrote: ↑u wot m8

That last sentence is supposed to imply that buy them this year, get rewarded the next year. I may be down big this year, but I'm positive they Will eventually be back above my cost.

Rickson9 wrote: ↑I would love to add more shares of The Buckle (BKE) to my portfolio. I currently hold ~7k shares. I like the business/management. I also like that CEO Dan Hirschfeld holds 16m shares.

7k shares of a ~$57 stock? That's almost 400k in one company haha. You must really like those guys.

deal_with_singh wrote: ↑7k shares of a ~$57 stock? That's almost 400k in one company haha. You must really like those guys.

It's a significant position but not an unusually large one. I bought them when they were in the teens many years ago. Compounding did the rest. Just like the stocks in my TFSA, RRSP, and everything else.

NB the special dividends were unexpected. Especially the $4.50 per sh paid out at the end of last year.
http://www.forbes.com/sites/dividendcha ... der-71113/

Rickson9 wrote: ↑ Bull markets are where the risks are the greatest. They should be doing absolutely nothing.

This sums up how I'm feeling right about now, and is the test I'm struggling with. Unallocated capital is sitting around. Everywhere I look, everything is inflated and expensive. This is actually the top (current top?) of the first full cycle I've invested in, from RE to stocks. Along with many others (including many on RFD) who started pouring non-trivial money for the first time into depressed markets over the last ~5 years, my investments all look great. It wasn't hard to make money, or to beat the market. Some investments have doubled.

Is it because I'm ultra-clever? Should I trust my awesome logical powers to gamble in a bull market where everybody wins? Is it a coincidence that every year the bull markets continue, I find more experts offering sure things? Probably not. I'll even admit that our RE investments were outright naive, and I'm fortunate to have ridden an incredible wave.

Cerenity wrote: ↑earlier this year i bought a bunch of stuff beaten down due to fiscal cliff / obamacare, (GD, UNH) or kept down due to negative news (BA)
lately i've been adding to utilities (SO), REITs (HCP), MLPs c-corp GPs (KMI) and canadian telcos (RCI, Telus) & banks (BNS)

i also have added to existing consumer staples names here n there, like JNJ, KO, MCD.

for world class consumer products businesses with strong brands, i regularly add to these as long as they're under 20x normalized PE. they are core positions that i rarely, if ever, sell.

I'll add to REITs (ZRE) if they continue dropping. It's unlikely that I'll be making any other Canadian investments this year.

I added JNJ last year and would have liked to add more to our RRSP portfolios, but it's had a huge run up along with everything else in the US this year. I'm taking a closer look at MCD because it hasn't. Mostly I'm just accumulating capital and slapping away my itchy trigger finger while waiting for something to deflate.

I do use an e-series couch potato for RESPs, which rather mechanically forced me to add to the international index early this year to great effect. I'm yet to really explore international markets, but will look at some of the big index holdings like HSBC and Unilever.

"The more cash that builds up in the treasury, the greater the pressure to piss it away." - Peter Lynch, One Up on Wall Street

deal_with_singh wrote: ↑Basically I try to find stocks I think are highly under valued and make my investments that way

This year for example from my portfolio, key winners...

Citigroup, up from $20s/30s to $53
Ford, up from $10.xx to $17 (sold at $17.20 or a day or two before their last earnings)
Bombardier, up from $3.30 (average purchase price) to $5

The above I've flipped many times as I have many other stocks

Key losers:
Iam Gold - down from $15 to 5
Kinross gold - down from $11 to $5
Barrick Gold - Down from $30 to $17


As I said, I simply invest in what I find undervalued. Last year the big one was financials; this years big one will be the gold miners.

see this is misleading, you cannot compare with the TSX returns when you are not investing in the TSX components

Underdog_Rally wrote: ↑
Mostly I'm just accumulating capital and slapping away my itchy trigger finger while waiting for something to deflate.

Forward 12 months PE for the S&P 500 is 15.08. And a number of stocks like 'MS', 'MET', 'C' and 'BAC' to name a few, are still trading below their book values. With the PE at these levels, I personally do not see anything deflating within the next 5 years.

I get a lot of my content through BNN via market call. Most of content surrounds the canadian economy such resource stocks. I am wondering if there is a place that focus primarily on US content with expert opinions on various stocks.

[QUOTE]I am wondering if there is a place that focus primarily on US content with expert opinions on various stocks. [/QUOTE]

... hate to be the one to say it, but I think you're looking for CNBC!

angelok wrote: ↑...And a number of stocks like 'MS', 'MET', 'C' and 'BAC' to name a few, are still trading below their book values.

For this reason, I've been increasing my positions on FAS (growth portfolio). I'll sell based on TA for XLF.

Rod