My Financial Journey

While my individual stocks did not have as many high flyers at last year they actually had one of their best performances in history with 16 of my 22 individual stocks outperforming the market. I did have one of my new holdings more than double this year in Alteryx. It also helped that two of my largest holdings in Netflix and Amazon had banner years which really gave my performance a super boost.

Alteryx + 135.34%
Chiptole +49.39%
Netflix +39.44%
BJ’S +38.93%
Shopify +37.08%
Intuitive Surgical +31.23%
Amazon +28.43%
Under Armour +21.40%

On the other side of the spectrum I did have a few stocks underperform the market. IPGP led the way losing nearly half of its value. This is a long time holding for and despite the haircut am still up 615% since I originally purchased it in 2008 and 2009. It also was up 116% last year so tends to be a volatile holding.

IPG Photonics -47.09%
Middleby -23.88%
Brookfield Infrastructure -22.94%
Axos Financial -15.79%
Arista Networks -10.56%

In annual tradition I will list all of my current investments. These really do not change significantly from year to year as I don’t do a lot of buying and selling and well now as my portfolio has grown so big the amount of money I am putting in towards new investments tends to be sort of insignificant.

One thing that sticks out is that Tesla now accounts for 12.80% of my retirement nestegg which is up from 7.95% it was last year. Overall I guess this is a good thing as my individual stock investments greatly outperformed the market this year and so it only makes sense that some of my individual stocks are now accounting for a larger percentage of my nestegg.

Some people might view this as more risky as individual stocks can be quite volatile and well Tesla kind of fits that definition. That being said volatility doesn’t bother me and long term gains are all I’m really concerned about.

The larger my portfolio gets ironically the less volatility affects me as unless you are right on the absolute edge of your magic number and are relying 100% on your portfolio for income there really is not that much risk when it comes to volatility.

If your portfolio is safely above your retirement number or if you have means to gain income from other sources than your portfolio then significant downswings really shouldn’t concern you. This is why I’ve always had a very hard time comprehending why you would ever have an investment portfolio that was less than 100% stocks as you are just throwing away money by diversifying with bonds.

The devils argument here is that if the extra gains really don’t help you or aren’t needed then really no sense in risking money you need for money you don’t need. That being said the extra long term gains in my mind are a larger safety margin then eliminating short term volatility.

Guess time will tell