I'm here to say that an everyday person can beat index funds. Maybe not every year, certainly not every month, but over the long-haul I'd give someone 3-to-1 odds on my portfolio versus the S&P 500 or the NASDAQ Composite.
This image shows my quarterly results since taking up active investing in earnest in 2020. I haven't beaten the indexes every quarter, but overall, as of the end of June, I was still up 100% (doubling my money) since investing a large sum of money. The two indexes were up around 20%.
In other words, I've quadrupled or quintupled the market returns these past two years, and while I don't think that will be common I don't think I'll actually lose to Mr. Market for prolonged periods (but we shall see).
So far in 2022, I'm up 15% while the indexes are down 15%-20%. I'm definitely not saying my portfolio will never have a down year, but it goes a long way to not buy overly expensive stocks and just stick to really solid businesses that are not appreciated by the market at a given time. There have been some options and non-dividend stocks sporadically in here, but this is almost all the returns are of a handful of select high-yielding dividend stocks these past two years.
When I was much younger I actually got killed in the market, but I like to think I've learned a lot from those mistakes and invest with a cooler head today.
Now, everyone wants to believe they're a stockpicking genius if they beat the market for a year or two in a row. But the fun will be to see if I can keep beating it throughout the decade. I'll be sure to keep talking about it on Reddit so stay tuned.
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