Originally Posted by Rain Man
Okay, here's my story of 2020.
My return: 11.7 percent.
Family return: 16.4 percent. (My wife beat me handily on investing this year.)
Okay, a bunch of you guys will make fun of me for my performance, and probably rightfully so. I underperformed. Let's see what happened. (I'm only looking at my investments here and not my wife's.)
Top 10 holdings and 2020 returns (including dividends). These are about 30 percent of my holdings.
Cash & Equivalent 0.26% (9 percent of holdings as a safety feature)
GOOG 28.12% (Google)
AMZN 71.60% (Amazon)
MSFT 39.49% (Microsoft)
MPW 9.77% (Medical property REIT)
TSM 83.21% (Semiconductor manufacturer)
TTWO 70.21% (Video game company)
FTANX 9.20% (Very conservative investment fund - mostly a safety anchor)
TSLA 720.07% (Tesla - yay!)
ATCO -18.57% (Shipping line)
If you look at my top 10 holdings, it looks like I was in line for a fantastic year. I had six huge winners and only one loser, and the median return was about 35 percent. If you average them with TSLA in there, you get up to a mean return of 101 percent. That, my friends, would be a great year.
My top ten full-year performers of the year were as follows.
TSLA 720% (Tesla)
EDUC 153% (Children's book company)
SLP 152% (Pharmaceutical software)
EDIT 138% (Gene editing)
ALB 104% (Industrial chemicals - big in lithium)
TSM 83% (Semiconductor manufacturer)
FVE 77% (Senior living)
AAPL 77% (Apple)
QCOM 73% (Internet 5G player)
AMZN 72% (Amazon)
Okay, this is still looking good, because 3 of my top 10 performers are in my 10 largest holdings. Three others are also pretty big in my portfolio. This is looking good.
I got smart and went on a buying spree this year while prices were down, so I also scored big on a number of stocks that I only held for part of the year.
ZM 170.90% (Zoom - videoconferencing)
MRNA 170.15% (Moderna - Covid vaccine))
NVAX 82.91% (Novavax - Covid vaccine)
CGNX 68.52% (Robotics/automation)
WAB 47.53% (Mostly train parts)
ENPH 45.18% (Solar stuff)
FANUY 35.72% (Robotics/automation)
KLAC 29.24% (Infrastructure to Manufacture Semiconductors)
SQ 29.21% (Square)
ARKK 27.51% (Innovation ETF)
So I smoked my mid-year buying spree. Home runs all over the place, and I only had a couple of losers. These are mostly very small holdings that I'm continuing to buy on dips. If you added them all up, though, they'd be my fourth-largest holding.
So what happened? Let's look at my biggest losers of the year.
CUK -51% (Cruise line)
TWO -46% (Real Estate REIT)
RMCF -43% (Retail)
RCL -40% (Cruise line)
BP -40% (Oil)
EPR -39% (Real Estate REIT)
CLI -38% (Real Estate REIT)
RDS.A -37% (Oil)
GPMT -37% (Real Estate REIT)
BA -36% (Aerospace)
And as a bonus, the next two on the list were:
COP -35% (Oil)
PSX -33% (Oil)
I think I see a pattern here.
Most of these were mid-sized holdings for me, but PSX was easily a top-ten holding at the beginning of the year. Not any more after those losses.
I liked the REITs for dividends and figured they were safe bets, but the pandemic beat them senseless. And I had cruise lines and oil going into 2020 because I figured they'd tend to move in opposite directions and give me stability (in a normal economy). But the covid beat up the cruise lines at the same time that the Russians and OPEC beat up oil. Losses of this magnitude were hard to overcome.
So overall, this was a year of volatility. I had some enormous wins and some enormous losses. In the big scheme of things. a 16.4 percent return is good, and even an 11.7 percent return is good. But I rue the missed opportunity to do even better.
I'm going to hang onto the cruise lines and the REITs. They'll eventually come back, I think. The oil companies kept their great dividends, which is nice, but I've started selling them down a bit and swallowing big losses. I hate that. I always viewed them as being pretty safe, but not any more.
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