Part of my excitement may have been due to the fact that the market is headed south again and also because I went back and calculated my individual stock performance since I started investing (previously I had lumped it in with my 401k/mutual funds) and found out that my individual stocks purchases are consistently beating the market and my mutual fund purchases and have been the last 4 years. You can now see this additional line item “Individual Stock Performance” and my performance vs the SP500 at the end of each Nestegg Report.

Here is my individual stock performance for 2006-2010 YTD vs the SP500
2006 -1.59%
2007 +1.76%
2008 +1.42%
2009 +9.32%
2010 YTD +6.13%

The only year I have trailed the SP500 was my first year and I sure picked some horrible stocks with my first couple purchases. Since then I have been doing pretty well. I guess this justifies some of the time I spend researching individual stocks.

Here is my monthly nestegg report.

Traditional Rollover IRA – $10,792.32 (-2.27%)
My Roth IRA – $33,229.84 (-2.72%)
Wife Roth IRA – $18,681.44 (-7.15%)
Current Traditional 401k – $59,670.70 (-2.29%)

Roth/Traditional % = 42.42 % (tax free)

Total Retirement Nest Egg $122,374.30 (-3.18%)

Monthly Contributions $908.76 (401k)
SPY Performance -5.15%
My Monthly Investment Performance -3.90 % (+1.25%)
My Monthly Individual Stocks Performance -4.52 % (+0.63%)

Traditional Rollover IRA – $11,043.50 (-7.25%)
My Roth IRA – $34,159.75 (-7.54%)
Wife Roth IRA – $20,119.40 (-3.74%)
Current Traditional 401k – $61,068.04 (-9.34%)

Roth/Traditional % = 42.95 % (tax free)

Total Retirement Nest Egg $126,390.69 (-7.82%)

Monthly Contributions $605.84 (401k)
SPY Performance -8.38%
My Monthly Investment Performance -8.26 % (+0.12%)
My Monthly Individual Stocks Performance -6.35 % (+2.03%)

Roth/Traditional % = 42.19 % (tax free)

Total Retirement Nest Egg $137,115.33 (+3.51%)

Monthly Contributions $605.84 (401k)
SPY Performance +3.04%
My Monthly Investment Performance +3.05 % (+0.01%)
My Monthly Individual Stock Performance +4.27 % (+1.18%)

Anyway these are my top 15 holdings in my various retirement accounts as of March 2010 and the percentage of my portfolio that is invested in them. Currently these top 15 holdings make up 75%+ of my portfolio – although I do have about 45 other smaller investments that make up the remaining 25%. As you can see the top 3 holdings are mutual funds that I hold in my 401k account – the rest with the exception of UMBIX are individual stocks. I in no way condone this type of investing and highly recommend that most people just stick their money in a low cost no-load index fund or lifestyle fund.

Something new this month that I realized wasn’t too hard to include is my investment performance against the SP500 each month. This will exclude any contributions that I made this month and show the true reason my accounts are rising or falling and whether or not my personal decision not to just buy index funds is a worthwhile effort. I went and updated the previous reports and so far in 2010 I am beating the SP500 by 11.83% 1.29% (mistakingly included 401k vesting berfore) I also calculated my performance for last year and last year I beat the SP500 by 9.26% 6.29% so I must be doing something right. Anyway here is this month’s report.

Traditional Rollover IRA – $12,030.93 (+9.77%)
My Roth IRA – $35,478.99 (+5.06%)
Wife Roth IRA – $19,387.04 (+3.88%)
Current Traditional 401k – $65,569.25 (+11.57%)

Roth/Traditional % = 41.42% (tax free)

Total Retirement Nest Egg $132,466.21 (+8.43%)

Monthly Contributions $3,021.70 (401k)
SPY Performance +4.19% 5.65% (forgot dividend)
My Monthly Investment Performance +5.96% (+0.31%)
My Monthly Individual Stock Performance +5.53% (-0.12%)

Traditional Rollover IRA – $10,959.90 (+0.74%)
My Roth IRA – $ 33,769.03 (+6.27%)
Wife Roth IRA – $18,663.59 (+5.94%)
Current Traditional 401k – $58,770.74 (+12.47%)

Roth/Traditional % = 42.92% (tax free)

Total Retirement Nest Egg $122,163.26 (+8.56%)

My contributions this month – $5,492.45
SPY Performance +2.39%
My Monthly Investment Performance +3.68% (+1.29%)
My Monthly Stock Investment Performance +3.68% (+2.79%)

Traditional Rollover IRA – $10,879.66 (-0.36%)
My Roth IRA – $ 31,775.51 (-1.62%)
Wife Roth IRA – $17,617.68 (-1.77%)
Current Traditional 401k – $52,254.95 (+18.06%)

Roth/Traditional % = 43.89% (tax free)

Total Retirement Nest Egg $112,527.80 (+6.75%)

My contributions this month – $10,579.91 (401k vesting)
SPY Performance -3.63%
My Monthly Investment Performance -3.29% (+0.34%)
My Monthly Individual Stock Performance -1.44% (+2.19%)

I’ve learned a lot over the past 4-5 years – I had lots of fun seeing my nestegg grow and my stocks jump or fall 20% or more in one day, but now after a few years I’ve realized that day to day, month to month, or year to year fluctuations really don’t mean anything and its just a waste of time to follow or care about them. I did my few years of homework and learned tons about personal finance and investing, put a plan together, and now I am in cruise control and can spend my time worrying about more important things like watching my kids grow up and working on my golf game. No amount of time and daily effort on my part is going to make a bit of difference on whether a stock or mutual fund of mine is going to go up or down or for me to try to rationalize why something went up or down. It simply does not matter. People who spend time doing this are wasting their time and probably hurting their performance, because well when you follow something so intently – you tend to take action – which is usually a bad thing.

From now on I will create these monthly reports – well partly because I started them from the beginning and its fun to see how the month to month fluctuations mean absolutely nothing in the long term. From now on I will check my investments maybe once or twice a year and then pretty much forget about them and live my life – which in the end is the whole purpose of this investing game.

Anyway here is my 2009 year end nestegg report and a chart of its growth over 2009.

Traditional Rollover IRA – $10,919.10 (+5.66%)
My Roth IRA – $32,298.79 (+5.58%)
Wife Roth IRA – $17,936.49 (+6.75%)
Current Traditional 401k – $44,261.51 (+13.03%)

Roth/Traditional % = 47.65% (tax free)

Total Retirement Nest Egg $105,415.89 (+8.80%)
My Contributions for 2009 $14,383.91
SPY Performance for 2009 +26.46%
Investment Performance for 2009 +32.75 (+6.29%)
Individual Stock Performance for 2009 +35.78% (+9.32%)

Traditional Rollover IRA – $10,334.01 (-3.37%)
My Roth IRA – $30,592.09 (+1.54%)
Wife Roth IRA – $16,801.79 (+4.59%)
Current Traditional 401k – $39,156.17 (+0.06%)

Roth/Traditional % = 48.92 % (tax free)

Total Retirement Nest Egg $96,884.06 (+0.09%)

Total Retirement Nest Egg $100,486.65

Well as you can see from above nestegg report I broke through the 6 figure mark for the first time in my life. What does this mean in the grand scheme of things – pretty much nothing, but it is a fun milestone to know that the value of my retirement nestegg reached $100,000 shortly after I turned 30.

On the flip side another milestone that I reached a little late is I now have contributed over $100,000 to my retirement accounts in fact $100,357.96 to be exact. So as you can see I am a horrible investor. After 5 years of living below my means, and consistently contributing a large percentage of my income to my retirement accounts on a regular basis I have amassed $128.69 in investment gains or 0.13% return over 5 years which annualized is even uglier. Far cry from the 10% that most people including myself use for rough planning on how much they will have for retirement huh?

Well there’s more to the story that makes me look slightly better. Over the same period of time the S&P 500 has returned a -2.0%. So while its not exactly apples to apples I am actually slightly beating the market over this year period of time. Woohoo!!

Another very interesting comparison is that the DOW just passed 10,000 for the first time in a year and is at a 52 week high. If I go back exactly 1 year ago - my retirement nestegg was $69,300. So while the DOW has returned 0% over the last 12 months – my retirement nestegg has grown by 44.8%. Even if I take out extra contributions I made during this time I still have a 33.44% market return – which crushes the market return.

Why is this? Is it because all of a sudden I turned into an investing genius? Yes and No. The biggest reason for my market beating returns in the last year was because I did not get freaked out when the market was crashing and everyone was predicting the end of the world. I did not pull my money out of the stock market and I did not stop contributing new money – I did the opposite.

In fact going back and reading my posts from a year ago I did a pretty good job of keeping a level head and taking advantage of the depressed stock prices and kept my purchasing during the huge downturn right on schedule – in fact in many cases I tried to amp it up the best I could and now am reaping the rewards. The simple mantra of Buy Low is not nearly as simple in practice as it sounds, because when things are low everyone blows things out of proportion and tells you the world is going to end and any money invested in stocks will vaporize in a short period of time. Ignoring all of those voices and trusting yourself is not an easy task, but luckily I did ok in my first test as investor and things have turned out ok.

So in the grand scheme of things what does $100,000 mean? Actually pretty much nothing other than I am heading in the general right direction – which is pretty much all you want to do with most long term efforts. Do a number of a little things right and they starting adding up to bigger and bigger accomplishments.

Now I tried this once before and it worked so I figure I would give it a try again. Personally $100,000 is great – it makes me feel good – I can pop an expensive bottle of water and celebrate my conquest of reaching $100,000, but in the grand scheme of things I would much rather see my retirement nestegg fall back down to $50,000 than go up to $150,000 at this point in my life if it means the market is going to tank again as I’m still very young (that’s what old people say each time they reach the next decade of age) and in the long-term I’d be much better off while I am still a net purchaser of investments to have those investment prices depressed.

That being said I look forward to the day my retirement nestegg grows to $200,000, $500,000, and $1,000,000, and beyond.