the know-nothing investor

When you start to understand the game you become more sceptical about people constantly bragging about their methods and rate of returns. Sometimes they don’t even need to show their return numbers to have a lot of followers that don’t question those figures or their incongruencies and if there are better ways to participate in the markets.

This year I decided to honour those “two digit figures” braggers by becoming one of them and saying to you, few fellow followers, that through my magnificient method and outstanding capabilities in 2014 I achieved 48.58% rate of returns.

Wait…wait…that number was achieved because I’m counting with new add money for buying assets purpose. Although it is a true number, because my portfolio value grew that much, it was due to add money from my savings.

This is a fair observation. I’m really bragging, but those number are unrealistic.

So looking for the NAV in my broker account, in 2014, my returns were still impressive with an increase of 17.16% .

Wait…wait…that number is only achieved because my main currency is in EUR and my assets are in USD. This pair’s valuation was great for dollar assets and only because of that I achieved so great returns. For me, that use euros in my daily life it was a great value increase. Nevertheless, I’m a naturally bragging again.

Well I only have two more number left for my 2014’s rate of returns, but those are just ok and they are not to great to brag about. The first one was the total return of my portfolio in USD, which was 4.92% and if I consider new entries over the year I’ll end up with a rate of return of 4.36%, which is still better than the average of active investors.

So don’t let you fool by numbers and braggers. All that rate of returns are true in someway, you can pick your favorite or just ignore my returns and focus on yours.

What I can say is, I’m glad with my 2014‘s results, after all my portfolio’s value more than recovered the losses of short-term madness.