CapitalTime

Articles on investing and capital management, with a quantitative focus.

Sold All Growth Positions

2023-10-03

These are not stock recommendations; I’m just sharing my stock portfolio. I don’t think picking individual stocks is worthwhile, but I enjoy the process and will run this portfolio for a few years.

I’m trying something new with my “Growth” portfolio. Over several years, I have observed that my stocks track the benchmark index (XIC) reasonably well. There are often periods of strong outperformance during these 1-year periods. What happens if I wait for a period of unusually strong outperformance, and then sell the stocks, switching to the index?

Today, I acted on such an opportunity, and sold all the stocks in my portfolio, replacing them with XIC. This “locks in” the outperformance for the current 1-year period.

I will calculate more comprehensive performance figures in the next annual update. For now, I will calculate two performance measurements.

Year-To-Date (YTD) Performance

This has been a very good year for my stock picks. The Growth portfolio is up 9.2% YTD, while the benchmark XIC is up just 0.4%.

Performance Since 2017-06-19

This is a pessimistic long-term performance measurement which skips over (ignores) the first great period in my stock-picking history. The Growth portfolio has performed at 7.9% CAGR compared to 6.6% CAGR for the benchmark.

My portfolio has beaten the index by +1.3% CAGR over 6.3 years. This could be random noise, for all I know.

It is interesting to note that Cathie Wood’s world famous ARKK fund has only performed at 5.5% CAGR in the same time period. Both my portfolio and the Canadian index are beating ARKK.

— Jem Berkes