Summary
2023 is at its end and its time to make an update to how the portfolios are doing.
There are a lot of bad things that happened and a lot of good things as well. Charlie Munger died this year and I’ve been sad because of it. My father also suffered stroke and being the eldest in the family, I have to take care of him, financially since he can not work now and emotionally, being always there.
But all in all, its a great year for the portfolio.
My portfolio went up +19.68% this year compared to the -1.77% by the PSEi. The increase is attributed to the US stocks performing really well at around 75.08% this year vs 25% to the S&P 500.
US only stocks
This performance carried the overall portfolio. Even if the PSEI is down, the US market was a great performer. It pays to be diversified.
| Funds | Return | PSEI |
| My Portfolio | 19.68 | -1.77 |
| Kid’s College Fund | 12.04 | -1.77 |
| VIP Partnership | 4.97 | -1.77 |
My Portfolio
As said previously, the performance of the overall portfolio was due to the US stock market performing well. I can not get into the details of this since I’m still in the US stock that is currently performing well and I don’t want to have any psychological bias. Once I have exited it, I might give an analysis.
Kid’s College Fund
Kid’s college fund is performing as expected. Nothing to say here since there is no movement in the stocks. It just keeps receiving dividends.
VIP Partnership
Same with the VIP partnership. It just keeps chugging along. I might become more aggressive this year, as I have seen a couple of stocks worth investing. Still beat the index so its good for now.
Others
Real estate, not so much has happened. I haven’t made any movements into this sector.
Private equity, well its not doing well. I invested in 2 companies. One is a tech startup and one is food startup. The food startup was really hit by the pandemic and I think its going to go to zero this year. I already written that investment off in my overall portfolio. The tech startup is doing ok as of this moment.
Will I invest in private equity in the future? Probably not. There’s a lot of things that can go wrong with private equity. And a lot of things not fully enforced compared to a public company. I’ll probably leave private equity next year and focus on what we do best, public companies – stocks.
Final thoughts
I might not be comparing apples to apples in my review. I compared my overall portfolio with PSEI. But then left out the US index. If I compare my 19.68% performance with the S&P index I still lost. My US stock beat the US index, but did my PH stock lost to PSEI? I don’t know.
The reason for this is I have a couple of broker accounts in the Philippines. And to know the performance of the overall PH portfolio, I have to login to each one and compute its performance since some of the brokers don’t have a reporting feature to do this accurately. I don’t want to waste much of my time with that since its just a personal portfolio. Everything gets totaled into one portfolio and see the growth there. Maybe in the future, I’ll have a more accurate view of the performance of just the PH stocks, or learn how to use the reporting tools of the brokers. But for now, I’ll keep it as is.
Something clicked with me during my time investing in the US stock market. There are a couple of realizations that probably contributed to its performance. Or I’m just pulling my leg and attribute luck to skill. Needless to say, I would like to test out my thesis and see if this kind of strategy is something worth keeping and will try it out in the next couple of years.
Oh, and by the way, you probably shouldn’t be buying my course or else you’ll learn how to invest.