Is anybody making money this year?

[Cardboard]

And by making, I mean at least a 20% gain in your portfolio.

 

And if so, what have you bought/shorted and what strategy have you employed?

 

NOTE: I have put 20% as an arbitrary threshold. IMO, with a market that has gone nowhere, it is a reasonable percentage gain to determine who has truly added alpha.

 

Cardboard

[muscleman]

And by making, I mean at least a 20% gain in your portfolio.

 

And if so, what have you bought/shorted and what strategy have you employed?

 

NOTE: I have put 20% as an arbitrary threshold. IMO, with a market that has gone nowhere, it is a reasonable percentage gain to determine who has truly added alpha.

 

Cardboard

 

No... By your 20% threshold.  :)

 

I usually do a yearly return survey near Christmas. I think it is too early to ask about other members' return right now.

[NewbieD]

I bet you will find plenty of people with +20% without shorting. Shouldn't be that uncommon with a fairly concentrated portfolio.

[rb]

I'm in the green but nowhere close to 20%. I wish I were there. That's a lot of coin.

[tombgrt]

Up 80%+, 100%+ with deposits. Lucky cloning, concentration and small capital base.

[Liberty]

I just had a look at TTM. Yes.

[mvalue]

Anyone who thinks 20% regularly is no big deal with 1m+ and has the record please get in touch with me and I'll get your fund set up.

[txitxo]

32% YTD. ~40 stocks, mostly European, also a few Aussie ones.

[Packer16]

In USD or CAD or EUR?  This year the USD has gained 15% YTD against the CAD and 8% against the EUR.  So holding USD assets provided a nice tailwind.

 

Packer

[enoch01]

+21% YTD, +83% TTM.  LOTS of volatility last month or so.

[Jurgis]

In true spirit of American business, Christmas is coming earlier and earlier to CoBF.

 

Soon we'll be reporting annual returns in April.

 

 

 

For full disclosure: Fido says -2.7% YTD, 0% TTM. Nothing to see here.

[stahleyp]

Up 80%+, 100%+ with deposits. Lucky cloning, concentration and small capital base.

 

Who are you cloning to be up 80% this year?

[muscleman]

Anyone who thinks 20% regularly is no big deal with 1m+ and has the record please get in touch with me and I'll get your fund set up.

 

Are you a lawyer? A fund salesman?

[mvalue]

Anyone who thinks 20% regularly is no big deal with 1m+ and has the record please get in touch with me and I'll get your fund set up.

 

Are you a lawyer? A fund salesman?

 

Neither - just a person who knows how rare that kind of talent is.

 

And also just making the point that looking at +20% as making decent money this year is a sort of crazy standard.

[wachtwoord]

I'm down 9.5% over 2015 to date.

[Jurgis]

Anyone who thinks 20% regularly is no big deal with 1m+ and has the record please get in touch with me and I'll get your fund set up.

 

Are you a lawyer? A fund salesman?

 

Neither - just a person who knows how rare that kind of talent is.

 

And also just making the point that looking at +20% as making decent money this year is a sort of crazy standard.

 

You forget you're on CoBF. Such numbers are norm here. ;)

 

Edit: Data:

Over 20% of CoBF had over 20% return in 2014 ( http://www.cornerofberkshireandfairfax.ca/forum/general-discussion/your-2014-portfolio-return/ ). We'll see how it goes this year.

[no_free_lunch]

32% YTD. ~40 stocks, mostly European, also a few Aussie ones.

 

txitxo,

 

These are great results and really just fantastic on such a large portfolio.  Can you comment on your investment process?

[muscleman]

Buffet: Focus on your inner scores.  :)

I think we should close this thread and reopen again in Christmas time.

[ERICOPOLY]

My book value per share is soaring when the portfolio is up huge.

 

However I'll guide your eye to my impressive gains in intrinsic value per share when the portfolio's performance is unworthy of special mention.

 

 

 

[investor-man]

My book value per share is soaring when the portfolio is up huge.

 

However I'll guide your eye to my impressive gains in intrinsic value per share when the portfolio's performance is unworthy of special mention.

 

ERICOPOLY: please never leave this forum :) Intrinsic value per share -- I like that one. I just realized, I'm worth SO MUCH MORE than I thought.

[Cardboard]

Isn`t one of the purposes of this website to learn something on how to become a better investor?

Then if not, what are you doing here?

 

I picked 20% because I think it is hard to achieve in this environment. I wanted to see if there are over-achievers and how they have done it if they are grateful enough to share. 15% still work, you know. However, I think that we need a meaningful difference between individual and market returns to call it real useful Alpha.

 

Regarding the timing, does it really make a difference? Who said that results need to be measured after exactly 365 days or the time for the Earth to rotate around the Sun? What do you do for leap years?

 

I thought that there would be much more to learn from a few individuals who are over-performing in a tough year, than by people pounding their chests after doing 40% when the market is up 30% simply because they were overweight one or two stocks or industries that did better than the market.

 

Cardboard

 

 

 

 

[gokou3]

I am up more than 20% from Jan. to July... then gave most of it back in August.  Also, my holdings are mostly in US stocks but my performance is shown in CAD.  ::)

[investor-man]

Isn`t one of the purposes of this website to learn something on how to become a better investor?

Then if not, what are you doing here?

 

I picked 20% because I think it is hard to achieve in this environment. I wanted to see if there are over-achievers and how they have done it if they are grateful enough to share. 15% still work, you know. However, I think that we need a meaningful difference between individual and market returns to call it real useful Alpha.

 

Regarding the timing, does it really make a difference? Who said that results need to be measured after exactly 365 days or the time for the Earth to rotate around the Sun? What do you do for leap years?

 

I thought that there would be much more to learn from a few individuals who are over-performing in a tough year, than by people pounding their chests after doing 40% when the market is up 30% simply because they were overweight one or two stocks or industries that did better than the market.

 

Cardboard

 

Here here - I'm up ~15%. Was up ~35% before all this bear market nonsense. I have a feeling I was in a lot of the same stuff as tomgbrt since I see him post a lot, but not as concentrated, and I'm in the US so I don't have tailwinds from dollar gains -- in fact that's working against me quite a bit as I own some names in Greece, Korea, China, and Canada (actually I don't own any US names currently).

[Jurgis]

I thought that there would be much more to learn from a few individuals who are over-performing in a tough year, than by people pounding their chests after doing 40% when the market is up 30% simply because they were overweight one or two stocks or industries that did better than the market.

 

Why is that?

 

It's likely that people who did >20% this year are:

- "overweight one or two stocks or industries that did better than the market". Not gonna pick on people in the forum, but Sequoia's outperformance for last couple of years is VRX. Only VRX. They were questioned about it during the investor meeting. Without VRX, their performance was below market.

- currency tailwinders like Packer said

- have good timing in shorting/derivatives

 

I'm all for learning, but if you follow this forum, you pretty much know what the few forum successes this year are (NTLS, VRX, am I missing any other big ones?).

 

What might be interesting, is that BRK and FFH are not carrying anyone this year. It's gonna be tough for people with BRK/FFH positions to perform or outperform... unless something changes in the last 3 months.

 

Not that I suggest "closing this thread".

However, it does bring people back to short-term thinking and p3415 envy, so I'd rather see it once a year or less frequently. But who am I to have an opinion (especially when my p3415 is non existent this year).

 

Peace

[rpadebet]

My intrinsic value is up a lot more than 20%. How much do you want it to be? I just have to decide on my time horizon or technically speaking, drag a few cells to the right in excel and then come up with a appropriate terminal value.

 

Mr. Market has the price of my portfolio up 25%+ TTM and about 16% YTD. I am not on talking terms with him though at the moment...

 

Also I think most of my loss making stocks are because of extensive R&D on my part. I intend to cut my R&D going forward. I think I should be able to add those back before I calculate my true cash eps. I should at least be allowed to capitalize it on my BS because I learnt a lot from them and it is truly a long term asset. We all know how knowledge compounds, so common, I shouldn't be expensing it.