April 2007 Score Card — Part II: Year-To-Date Returns

For the first four months of the year, our net worth has grown at a rate of 9.81%, adding more $45,000 to our nest egg. Of course, a major part of that increase came from contributions from our salaries as well as company matches in our retirement accounts. Nonetheless, our investments in various accounts (regular, tax-deferred) also registered some healthy gains as those shares, though a small number, we bought years ago at cheap give a nice boost of the total return. For the year, the returns of major indexes are:

• Dow Jones: added 748.73 points or 6.01%
• NASDAQ: increased 142.55 points or 5.9%
• S&P 500: gained 77.62 points or 5.47%

So how are our investments doing so far this year? The year-to-date returns of our taxable investments (stocks, ETFs, and mutual funds) are listed in the following table.

Well, performances of most of our individual stocks are disappointing. Except Microsoft (MSFT) and Progress Energy (PGN), which stay above the water, all other seven stocks we own show negative returns year-to-date with GRRF being the biggest loser which lost 45% of its value, :((. Could this be an argument that we shouldn’t buy individual stocks? Or we just weren’t lucky to buy the right stocks at the right time? :)) Our mutual funds and ETFs, on the other hand, did pretty well, generating an average return of 6.8%. The only fund that suffered in the first four months is PEY, losing 1.51%. In addition, another four funds, PFM, PGJ, VBR, and TGLDX, lagged the broad market in performance, though not by much.

The other day I was thinking of making some changes to our mutual fund investments and one of the targets was CGMFX. Ironically, it’s the second best performer in our fund investments. It’s not going to be an easy decision when it comes whether to keep or dump the fund.

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