Wifts Investment Group

For the month of January, 2011 our portfolio was up 0.52% compared to 2.33% for the S&P500. Our portfolio underperformed the S&P500 by 1.81%. Not a good start for the new year, but we remained focused on the long-term and try not to get carried away with short-term performance (in either direction). As I mentioned in the last post, we are taking some defensive position which hurt us a little this month since the market has been going up.

Portfolio Movers

On the positive side, LMI Aerospace (LMIA) was up 17.14% in January. It had been going down since it reported it’s earning in November and we were able to add more position at $14.80. It closed January at $18.73.

Archer Daniels Midland (ADM) was up 8.61% mostly because the agricultural commodity prices has been going up.

Gilead Science (GILD) was up 5.91% after it announced good quarterly numbers.

Cisco (CSCO) went up 4.55%.

Ameron International (AMN) went down 9.69% after it announced a good quarterly and annual numbers but lowered the guidance for 2011.  It expects 2011 earning (ending November 2011) between $3-$3.50. Currently, AMN makes up 12.3% of our portfolio.

Aceto Corporation (ACET) was down 4.33% for the month.

Transactions

Sold KND at $20.5: For a long term gain of 74%.

Sold AHCI at $2.5: For a short-term gain of 17.9% mostly because it is a small company and we felt we needed to cut some of our riskier holdings while the market was still up.

Our cash position stands at 17.04%.

Our partnership NAV for the month ending January, 2011 is $12.91

Here is a good article for young workers from WSJ.

Slow and Steady Saving Still Pays

I apologize for not being able to  post our portfolio updates for the past few months. Here is our end of the year update.

2010 was a good year for us. Our portfolio returned 28.49% for the year compared to 12.78% for the S&P500, which means our portfolio outperformed the S&P 500 by 15.71%. Since we started this portfolio (11/04/2008) our annualized internal rate of return is 46.23% compared to 24.01% for a portfolio invested in S&P500 index ETF (SPY).

Here is the list of our holdings for the new year sorted according to their weight on the portfolio.

Note that we are holding some put options for SPY expiring in March, 2011 as a hedge against a short-term drop. Our overall goal is to beat the S&P 500 by few percentage point  annually over a long period of time by buying and holding strong companies. Therefore, we do not like to sell our holdings even if we feel the market is over-valued right now. Instead, having a put option will protect our portfolio value to some extent if the market does drop and at the same time we’ll only sacrifice 1.6% if the market goes up. Basically, if the market goes up 5%, our return will be 3.4% but if the market goes down 5%, our loss will be around 2-3% (assuming our portfolio co-relates perfectly with SPY, right now our beta is around 0.99 including cash according to google finance data).

Our partnership NAV for the month ending December, 2010 is $12.83.

Due to minor overlooking of administrative matters, our domain had been hijacked from us for a while. But all issues have been sorted out and we are back!

Apologies for any inconveniences to our few users who actually visited the site during the down time.

Check back in for updates…

R.

For August 2010, our portfolio returned -4.46% compared to -4.50% for the S&P500. Our portfolio outperformed the S&P500 by 0.03%.

Portfolio Movers

August was a down month for most of the stocks. The biggest decliner was Acetco Corp (ACET) which was down 17.74% after going up 19% in July. LMI Aerospace (LMIA) and Vicon Industries (VII) were both down 12%. Bank of America (BAC) and Kindred Helthcare (KND) were down 11%.