My best and worst stocks in 2020

My best and worst stocks in 2020

In annual tradition I will list my best and worst individual stock performers for 2020. As you can see from the list below which I cut off at only stocks that I have owned that have doubled for me it was a crazy year.

Tesla +720%
CRWD +256%
TWLO +228%
ZM +193%
DDOG + 181%
SHOP 177%
TTD +170%
NET 122%

Obviously Tesla led the pack and I did do some portfolio rebalancing this spring during the pandemic and bought a few new stocks all of which went bananas. Many of them were up more than the figures above, but I only listed the returns since I bought them in March.

Now for my worst stock of 2020.

SBUX +19.73%

Starbucks was up just under 20%. Every single stock that I own beat the market this year. That is absolutely crazy.

Going forward I will look to rebalance my portfolio to be more balanced. My individual stocks have performed so incredibly well and have grown to become a very large proportion of my retirement nestegg. It probably makes sense to sell off some of these stocks and put them in index funds as the risk/reward situation does not really help me much. The only thing that could change my plans is a massive drop so it probably makes sense to diversify my portfolios more. On the flip side one could argue that I have a big enough margin of error that I should just keep moving full steam ahead as even a 50% haircut would not be devastating. It’s easy to think you are smart when the market is at all time highs, but this cannot go on forever and it probably makes sense to take some of the drama/entertainment out of my life.

Investment Holdings January 2021

Investment Holdings January 2021

TSLA34.07%
VPMAX12.34%
VIIIX12.11%
SHOP8.22%
NFLX5.97%
AMZN5.79%
WOLFRIVER2.99%
CRWD2.84%
AAPL2.57%
CMG2.27%
DDOG1.65%
NET1.59%
SBUX1.58%
COUP0.62%
OKTA0.60%
TDOC0.54%
FUBO0.51%
TWLO0.44%
BIP0.41%
ZM0.38%
ISRG0.36%
TXRH0.33%
DOCU0.32%
TTD0.32%
$$CASH0.30%
COST0.29%
MSFT0.28%
VFIAX0.20%
FSLY0.12%
MyFinancialJourney.com – 15 years later

MyFinancialJourney.com – 15 years later

I know I’ve done a few retrospective blog posts recently, but 15 years ago today I created this site and wrote my first couple blog posts. At the time I was a young kid with grand plans for the future and trying to learn everything I could about personal finance and investing. I was really inspired by 2 million, All Financial Matters, PF Blueprint and a few other of the first personal finance bloggers, many of whom no longer write or even operate their sites.

I am not sure if it was confidence or naivety, but personal finance to me really was relatively simple and in order to become wealthy it was just basic math. Spend less than you earn, invest the money, and let time keep incrementing the compounding number in the equation and you would be come rich. No crazy skill or luck was needed, just discipline to keep doing simple things for a period of time.

I realized not a lot of people understood this and if some day I was successful in accumulating a lot of wealth people would always assume I was some sort of anomaly that got lucky or was some brilliant investor. To be honest that was probably a big part in why I created this blog. I could document how incredibly simple it was.

Spend less than you earn, invest that money, and wait until you have enough. Anyone has the ability to do this. The less you spend the less time you have to wait. The longer you are willing to wait the less you have to save. The number one factor in the equation is spend less than you earn. Sure waiting 100 years to tap into your savings will have large impacts, but in the scope of life I think it makes sense to cut the time factor down to a more reasonable 10-20 years.

Ironically I view the investment return piece of it to be the least important of the 3 factors in the equation, but this is where most people try to take short cuts and ultimately set themselves up for failure and disappointment. Buy a total stock market index fund. Done end of story.

So all you have to worry about is finding ways to spend less than you earn and then having patience to do nothing other than make regular contributions to your index fund and you will be wealthy. It’s so incredibly simple and yet no one does it.

When I started this blog I posted my retirement nestegg it was $24,616.93. At the beginning of this month just shy of 15 years later my nestegg had grown to $2,477,729.77. That is a gain of over 100x in 15 years. Clearly I must have done something spectacular with loads of risk/luck to achieve that insane amount of wealth. Nope I spent less than I earned, invested it, and let compounding work its magic for 15 years.

Now don’t get me wrong I had a lot of things going for me. The stock market over the last 15 years has been some of the best times in history to be invested and I did make a investments in individual stocks that paid off big, but I also had a lot of things going against me. I had 5 kids, single income, and chose to take lower paying jobs and turn down promotions to be able to spend more time being a dad/husband. I make good money and my company has good benefits, but even then almost all working families with 2 incomes likely surpassed my earnings throughout these 15 years. There is nothing special with my circumstance.

Also 100x growth is amazing and having nearly $2.5M is absolutely mind boggling, but it’s also not necessary. Like if I had half of that amount of money because of lower investment returns I would still be in amazing shape with a big pile of money as a safety net to make a lot of decisions without money being a primary factor. I would still be taking my summers off. I would still be turning down promotions. I would still have everything I needed and more. Just like that number growing to $10M would not materially change my life. I have more than enough to be secure for the rest of my life and make decisions based on their merits and not on the financials. This is true freedom. This is happiness.

1. Spend less than you earn.
2. Invest it in index funds.
3. Wait until you have enough**
4. Enjoy life

** This might be the hardest decision in the sequence. I think we all think we need more than we do and sacrifice other things we truly want for excess over what would truly make us happy. This has been a struggle but please figure out what this is for your situation. It definitely shouldn’t be more than 25x your annual spending and even a figure probably half of that can give you a tremendous amount of freedom and flexibility to make decisions strictly based on happiness and not worrying about financial stressors.

Retirement Nestegg Report November 2020

Retirement Nestegg Report November 2020

Well another all time record high for our nestegg and near all-time high for gains and percentage. It’s bonkers that a gain of $430k and 21% in a single month is not an all-time record, but no just a few months ago in August the increases were even higher. As usual a large percent of these gains were driven by the performance of Tesla stock though the market has a whole had an impressive 10.76% gain now that the election is behind us. What’s even more impressive is I wasn’t even aware that the gains this month were anything special until I did this report. Looks like yesterday was a down day so I likely surpassed the $2.5M milestone yesterday – which equates to $100k forever retirement income which is more money than we will ever need.

Going forward I just need to come up with a better plan on how I can access any of this money over the next 20 years and start dialing back the amount of time we spend working.

Fidelity Taxable – $5,466.09(+6.81%)
Taxable Account- $275,325.93(+36.09%)
Private Stock $82,500(+0.00%)
Traditional Rollover IRA – $99,887.68(+28.91%)
My Roth IRA – $876,355.03(+25.95%)
Wife Roth IRA – $485,811.18(+23.15%)
Wife 401k – $5,431.03(+11.41%)
Traditional 401k – $646,952.83(+11.47%)

Roth/(Traditional+Taxable) % = 55.37% (tax free)

Total Retirement Nest Egg $2,477,729.77(+21.28%)
Retirement Salary (4%) $99,109

Monthly Contributions $933.84(401k)
SP500 Performance +10.76%
My Monthly Investment Performance +21.24% (+10.48% vs SP500)
My Monthly Individual Stocks Performance +26.81% (+16.05% vs SP500)

Retirement Nestegg Report October 2020

Retirement Nestegg Report October 2020

Another down month for my retirement nestegg and another month of underperformance by my investments. My nestegg however is still up over 60% YTD, so I think I will be ok. This has been my best year ever on every metric and volatility is to be expected. Long term the trajectory looks great.

Fidelity Taxable – $5,117.72(+0.87%)
Taxable Account- $202,311.18(-8.18%)
Private Stock $82,500(+0.00%)
Traditional Rollover IRA – $77,484.52(-6.34%)
My Roth IRA – $695,775.93(-7.36%)
Wife Roth IRA – $394,484.57(-7.46%)
Wife 401k – $4,874.69(-1.90%)
Traditional 401k – $580,366.73(-2.51%)

Roth/(Traditional+Taxable) % = 55.37% (tax free)

Total Retirement Nest Egg $2,042,915.34(-5.78%)
Retirement Salary (4%) $81,716

Monthly Contributions $1,400.76(401k)
SP500 Performance -2.77%
My Monthly Investment Performance -5.85% (-3.08% vs SP500)
My Monthly Individual Stocks Performance -7.45% (-4.68% vs SP500)

Retirement Nestegg Report September 2020

Retirement Nestegg Report September 2020

Well after last months insane month I should not be surprised at all to see my accounts dip a little bit this month. Ironically my first month back to work and my net worth dropped by over $150k, while the 3 previous months where I was not earning income my net worth increased by over $828k.

This means nothing per say especially in those types of short term freak occurrence time frames, but it does put into perspective that I’ve put myself in a situation where working for money is trivial compared to the massive snowball of previously saved and invested dollars that are going to work for me every single day regardless of what I decide to do when I get out of bed.

That part is the incredibly powerful part and was the whole point of everything and I think it’s still something that I am having trouble coming to grasp with as to just what a powerful and meaningful force that is and how to best use it to make my life better.

Big numbers are big and sometimes I don’t fully grasp what my nestegg is worth and capable of. In a relatively non eventful month we just lost a years worth of working salary. In the prior 3 months we gained over 5 years of working salary. That’s insane and what’s really insane is that it’s only going to continue to get more and more insane as time goes on.

Fidelity Taxable – $5,073.72(+3.76%)
Taxable Account- $220,327.48(-10.76%)
Private Stock $82,500(+0.00%)
Traditional Rollover IRA – $82,729.94(-2.33%)
My Roth IRA – $751,045.35(-9.11%)
Wife Roth IRA – $426,286.63(-7.38%)
Wife 401k – $4,968.88(-4.80%)
Traditional 401k – $595,324.03(-2.86%)

Roth/(Traditional+Taxable) % = 55.37% (tax free)

Total Retirement Nest Egg $2,168,256.03(-6.69%)
Retirement Salary (4%) $86,730

Monthly Contributions $531.12(401k)
SP500 Performance -3.92%
My Monthly Investment Performance -6.69% (-2.77% vs SP500)
My Monthly Individual Stocks Performance -8.51% (-4.59% vs SP500)

Retirement Nestegg Report August 2020

Retirement Nestegg Report August 2020

Well an all-time record month for our retirement nestegg in every single category. Our nestegg hit an all time high north of $2.3M which was an increase of over $430k over last months all-time high. Our nestegg grew by 23.41% and our individual stock holdings grew by 31.33% compared to the market returns of 7.01% just this month. This now puts our investment gains north of over $1M year to date.

All of this is mind blowing and I don’t even know what to think. This is a combination of us living significantly below our means for our entire lives, investing that money, and then more recently getting incredibly lucky with the small allocation that we had dedicated to individual stocks.

As far as the path forward I very much am aware of the easy come easy go – especially in the short term, especially with the meteoric rise of Tesla which now accounts for 1/3 of our retirement nestegg. Things will be volatile and I do expect I will be writing reports at lower values than this one. Luckily for me I’m playing a long term game so I don’t have to worry about timing the market like an idiot

What I will work on though is increasing the amount of money I can use for early retirement. I have a unique problem of having enough money to retire, but it is currently kind of in the wrong buckets. Most of it is held in my 401k and IRA accounts which I cannot touch for the next 18 years without paying penalties and taxes. I am going to withdraw the $100k or so of contributions that we made to our Roth IRAs and put it into a taxable account to hopefully grow our taxable account to a figure large enough to live off of for the next 18 years.

Fidelity Taxable – $4,889.74(-13.43%)
Taxable Account- $246,889.41(+55.42%)
Private Stock $82,500(+14.58%)
Traditional Rollover IRA – $84,706.37(+9.06%)
My Roth IRA – $826,305.88(+31.36%)
Wife Roth IRA – $460,263.23(+26.88%)
Wife 401k – $5,219.59(+7.38%)
Traditional 401k – $612,867.58(+7.14%)

Roth/(Traditional+Taxable) % = 55.37% (tax free)

Total Retirement Nest Egg $2,323,641.80(+23.41%)
Retirement Salary (4%) $92,945

Monthly Contributions $5000(Taxable)
SP500 Performance +7.01%
My Monthly Investment Performance +23.41% (+16.40% vs SP500)
My Monthly Individual Stocks Performance +31.33% (+24.32% vs SP500)