What does your personal portfolio look like?

Water Cooler Investing
#1

With christmas bonuses not too far away, I’m starting to think its time to put a plan together for my own portfolio (as a new grad this is the first time I’ll have a big chunk of money to play with) so I’m curious how people apply it in their own lives.

Do you have a method to choose weights between risky and risk free? How many different stocks do you hold? How often do you rebalance? Do you even follow portfolio theory for personal use?

(Yeah…I just got through the portfolio management readings last night)

#2

just buy SPY and keep building the position, keep some cash to trade options for alpha

consider diversifying between a few indicies including small caps/ bonds/ commodities/ gold… it’s not sexy but based on academic research and portfolio management theory, buy and holding “the market”/ passive investing, is optimal. the skill of a manager comes down to market timing (entry/exits) including using portfolio insurance.

the way to make it rich is to manage others people money and get that 2/20 (emphasis on the 2), in which case your job will be to disguise the beta strategy and abuse the incentive fee call option.

#3

You have Christmas bonus? Is this the year end bonus, or is it some other special bonus?

Anyway, since you ask nicely… About 60% of my stuff is US stock index. I am not good at looking at individual companies, but I have a lot of macro opinions… so I have several country or sector ETFs (like REIT, emerging market, etc.) I don’t have a lot of bonds or cash. If you are going to do 80% risky assets, what’s the difference from doing 90% or 95% risky assets?

I don’t do options in my own portfolio… It’s a bit too involving…

#4

In my retirement fund, all indexing and all dollar cost averaging.

90% equity

10% short-term bonds (Bonds is at the tail end of a 30 year bull run imo)

In my equity portfolio:

25% canadian index (resource intensive)

25% S&P index

25% EAFE index

25% emerging market index

Time horizon: 35 years

#5

Microcaps, undervalued asset plays, and a few tech growth stocks.

#6

what market cap do you consider micro? do you value penny stocks?

#7

I generally don’t follow portfolio theory in personal use. Weighting is generally based on if there is stuff worth buying, like I won’t buy for the sake of buying so I may have excess cash for a while. I actually need to rebuild my portfolio since I recently liquidated to consolidate my taxable accounts. I generally buy individual stocks that are diverse from each other by taking time to study them, their industry, their trading ranges. I should consider using ETFs more, but I’ve always been exposed to equity analysis from an individual stock perspective… Old habits die hard.

My 401k is 40% large cap, and 15% each in mid cap, small cap, emerging mkt, and RE. Dollar wise my 401k is small compared to my Roth IRA and soon to be reinvested taxable account because both my employer match and investment options suck.

#8

I consider < 50M to be micro, I own RSKIA in that space, but am studying a few others. Penny stocks are fine if fundamentals are good…I also have DJCO.

#9

My post was cut off for some reason. But I consider micros to be less than 50M. I have one int hat space - RSKIA - George Risk Industries, and I own a larger one DJCO. I’m looking at a few other sub 50Ms right now but nothing concrete. Penny stocks in theory are ok as long as fundamnetals are good. One I’m looking at is OPXS.

#10

Long only buy/hold investments are a diversified set of etfs (treasuries, ig/hy/em bonds, preferreds, mlps, domestic/emerging equity, and reits), risk weighted. Let it sit and compound - will go to cash given certain volatility thresholds.

…and I buy lottery tickets every week.

#11

35% target date 2045 fund

35% silver and silver mining

15% two stocks I’ve held for a while

15% cash - anticipating a 5-10% pullback.

#12

My company’s target date funds suck. I was looking at the prospectus, and basically all the target date funds (2015, 2025, … 2050) lag all the index funds for 1 year, 3 year and 10 year. So, they are worse than large cap stock index, worse than small cap, worse than emerging markets, worse than mid cap… Wtf are these clowns doing?

#13

sweep, whats with the heavy allocation to silver?

#14

@ohai - that sucks. Mine are really good actually. A bit conservative but that’s fine given my…lack of diversification.

@Frank - This is a light allocation for me. Normally I’m closer to 50-60% gold/silver. Let’s say my strategic weight to precious metals is 50%. I tactically manage my exposure to physcial gold, physical silver, gold miners, and silver miners.

I could write forever on this but it basically comes down to my outlook on the metal vs the miners. The miners have underperformed the metal for a couple years now for a few reasons, but there are still some good names out there. SLW being the most stable in terms of their financials. AG has the best management (very important in mining) and mines in politically stable countries - relatively speaking. So I generally have some sort of allocation to both those. I’ve sold some of each over the last few weeks to raise some cash. Not bearish on silver necessarily, but the miners can get dinged up just for being equities. Anyway, right now I’m about 50/50 physical silver/miners.

Why silver over gold? In extremely simplistic terms, silver is a beta play on gold. If you bullish on gold long-term, as I am, silver is a higher risk, higher reward play. But, that’s not my thesis at all. I look at the global supply of the silver that’s above ground plus the annual production from mines, and I don’t see it meeting global demand. Indeed, there appears to be major shortages looming over the next few years. Anytime I can frontrun a supply crunch I’m all over it. Did well with the silicon shortage playing WFR a few years ago. But I digress. Silver is an extremely useful industrial metal so it’s sensitive to global demand for electronics. From that angle I benefit from a steady global economic recovery. And, silver is money (in the same way gold is). Gold’s being bought by central banks, silver is being bought by people. Demand for physical silver ebbs and flows, but there’s a steady uptrend as people hedge against their local currency devaluing.

Why precious metals in general? I’ve detailed my reasoning several times of the last few years and absolutely nothing’s changed. Negative real rates, unprecedented monetary stimulus, complete lack of faith in central planning, (hyper)inflationary concerns over the medium-long term, global supply and demand imbalance, central banks diversifying away from fiat and USD in particular, geopolitical unrest, and a general feeling things are going to be worse in 5-10 years than they are today.

I’m sure I left several things out, but for a monday morning that’s a good start.

#15

I haven’t looked at these in a while:

First 1/3rd of my investments:

ALLIANZ NFJ INTL VALUE INST 5%

RETIREMENT 2055 FUND 10%

PIMCO ALL ASSET, INST. 10%

EQUITY INDEX TRUST CLASS C 10%

VALUE FUND 15%

SMALL-CAP VALUE FUND 15%

HIGH YIELD FUND 10%

MID-CAP GROWTH FUND 15%

BALANCED FUND 10%

Second 1/3rd of my investments:

G Fund Government Securities 9.57%

F Fund Fixed Income Index 17.23%

C Fund Common Stock Index 23.89%

S Fund Small Cap Stock Index 23.32%

I Fund International Stock Index 10.69%

–

And my actively managed peer lending bond portfolio is roughly 1/3rd of my entire investments:

Average Loan Profile (weighted by loan size) Loan Size: $25 Inquiries: 0.6 Monthly Income: $7136 Credit History: 16.4 yrs Open Lines: 11.3 Total Lines: 26.7 % Utilization: 59% Revolving Debt: $21029 Average DTI: 15% Has Mortgage: 58.6% 2yr DQ’s > 0: 1.7% Owns Home: 3.4% Public Records > 0: 2.1% Renter: 37.9%

#16

Rawraw, are your actively managed funds beating their benchmark?

#17

They were during all the violatility. They just started to underperform this past month.

#18

Can you also post last 4 digits of SSN, bank account number, and also your mother’s maiden name? This is for… discussion purposes…

#19

^.-

#20

50/50 - ETFs and individual stocks. 0 Bonds. Some cash. (Used to be 30% bond ETFs and CDs and 10% PMs in 2007 but I’ve been selling them over the last 5 years to buy stocks.)

50% ETF = approx 10% each of US large cap, Emerging large-cap, Europe+Japan large cap, Dividend growers and 5% each of REITs and utilities.

50% individual stocks from largest to smallest - BRK/B (in taxable AND tax-exempt - I really believe in WEB), SCCO ( low-basis, bought in 2005 and it kept growing), BKE, large consumer staples like HNZ, KMB; out-of-favor techs like QSII, INTC, DELL; out-of-favor industrials (bought in Fall 2011 when they fell through the floor) like ITW, EMR, etc.

Very recently trimmed to about 90% stocks+ETF and 10% cash. I am not a market timer but I gave in to the temptation. Like someone (Munger/Graham) said - the hardest thing to do is sit still on your ass and do nothing. Even though 9 times out of 10 that turns out to be the right thing to do.