Markets have fallen aggressively during 2022. Our total investment is back to where it was in 2020, after adjusting for contributions.
The stocks that have done well so far in 2022 are energy (oil, gas) and utilities have done OK. Unfortunately, we have few of these stocks in our portfolio (unless you have an index like the S&P 500) because they are viewed as bad for the climate and on ESG measures. Technology stocks have been hit very hard, and a lot of the other stocks that did well earlier in the market like consumer stocks have also fallen quite a bit.
In addition, over the last year the dollar has risen 12% compared to a basket of world wide currencies. This makes our investment in overseas stocks (Europe, Japan, China) worth less as a result (even if their investment performance was flat, they’d be down an average of 12% in our US dollars). This also hurts a lot of multi-national companies who have significant overseas sales, because those revenues are “less” when converted back into US dollars.
As a result, we are at a point where we need to re-look at the construction of our portfolio and decide which stocks we want to continue to hold onto and what to sell. And of what we sell, where do we re-invest that cash, or do we hold it in our portfolio to reduce risk?
Portfolio one is 20 1/2 years old. The beneficiary contributed $10,000 (net of withdrawals) and the trustee $20,000 for a total of $30,000. The current value is $82,037 for a gain of $52,037 or 173%, which is 8.3% / year when adjusted for the timing of cash flows. Go to the link or here to see details.
This portfolio is down with the others and we can look at a few stocks:
Block (SQ) – this is an interesting stock but was hit hard in recent SAAS / payment stock re-valuations
Pinduoduo (PDD) – the Chinese tech stocks have been devalued by Chinese government actions, tensions with the USA, and a general re-evaluation of tech stocks
Meta (FB) – Meta’s challenges are well documented as they pivot to Augmented reality – but they still make a lot of profits and have great assets worldwide
Rocket (RKT) – we sold half our rocket when they hit a “meme stock” high which is good in hindsight. The stock pays a strong dividend but is hit hard by the impending raise in interest rates which chokes mortgage growth and refinancing
Alibaba (BABA) – like PDD this stock suffered from a triple whammy
Paypal (PYPL) – one of the most perplexing on the list, PayPal fell instantly out of favor with analysts after stopping guidance the shares cratered without a significant negative event in the business
OKTA (OKTA) – this software company had an acquisition the market didn’t like and then was hit with the overall re-evaluation of software companies valued by growth not profits
Portfolio Two is 17 1/2 years old. The trustee contributed $18,200 and the beneficiary $27,000 for a total of $45,200. The current value is $72,659 for a gain of $27,460 or 60.8%, which is 6.7% / year when adjusted for the timing of cash flows. Go here or to the link for more details.
This portfolio contains a mix of ETF’s, cash and individual stocks. The ETF’s mainly track the market and cash is even so let’s talk about some of the stocks, as follows:
Meta (FB) and Alibaba (BABA) are down significantly. Meta has been hit with the tech downturn and Apple privacy changes and Alibaba has been hit by regulatory and tech crackdowns in China
Cloudflare (NET) is an innovative tech company with a high valuation (in terms of price to sales, one of the highest for tech companies) and it has been variable recently, although it has bounced back from recent lows
Nike (NKE) and L’Oreal (LRLCY) are relatively recent purchases that are in the consumer product space and they are down since we bought them (although not as big as the tech drops)
Portfolio Three is 14 1/2 years old. The beneficiary contributed $7500 and the trustee $15,200 for a total of $22,700. The current value is $35,270 for a gain of $12,570 or 55%, which is 5.3% / year adjusted for the timing of cash flows. Go to the link or here for more details.
This portfolio is invested in ETF’s that contain US stocks only and it has been mostly in line with the US market.
Portfolio five is 12 1/2 years old. The beneficiary contributed $6500 and the trustee $13,000 for a total of $19,500. The current value is $35,277 for a gain of $15,766 or 80%, which is 8.2% / year adjusted for the timing of cash flows. Go here or to the link on the right for more details.
Portfolio five has been impacted by the market decline, as follows:
We made some purchases earlier in the year of Appian (APPN), Intel (INTC), Block (SQ) and SNAP (SNAP) that fell 30% – 50% after the purchase. We will look again these stocks
We bought Activision (ATVI) which did well (up 20%) with an acquisition offer from Microsoft; we should sell at this point
Cloudflare (NET), OKTA (OKTA) and PayPal (PYPL) have all been impacted recently. Cloudflare fell far but came back. OKTA made an acquisition that the market did not like and was hit by a hack and the general decline in software valuations. PayPal stopped giving forward guidance and was hit hard by the market. We will re-look at these stocks
Portfolio four is 12 1/2 years old. The beneficiary contributed $6500 and the trustee $13,000 for a total of $19,500. The current value is $45,993 for a gain of $26,494 or 136%, which is 11.7% / year adjusted for the timing of cash flows. See the details here or at the link on the right.
Some of the stocks have declined based on recent market events and are being reviewed including:
Block (SQ) is a new holding that declined since we bought it
Cloudflare (NET) is an innovative software company that went up a lot and then lost significant value
OKTA (OKTA) is a software company that had been a great performer for a long time but recently was hit by the re-valuation of software growth companies, an acquisition the market didn’t like, and a hack
Portfolio 8 is 6 1/2 years old. The beneficiary contributed $3500 and the trustee $7000 for a total of $10,500. The current value is $15,449 for a gain of $4949 or 47% which is 9.7% / year. See details here or in the link on the right.
Like the market as a whole our stocks have gone down recently. Some items under review:
New purchases Block (SQ) and Nike (NKE) have gone down since we purchased them
OKTA(OKTA) had been a great performing stock but they went down with the high growth software stocks as well as an acquisition the market did not agree with and a recent hack
Paypal (PYPL) was another well performing stock that fell significantly when they had an earnings call and offered cautions on future growth
Portfolio Seven is 6 1/2 years old. The beneficiary contributed $3500 and the trustee $7000 for a total of $10,500. The current value is $12,542 for a gain of $2,042 or 19%, which is 4% / year adjusted for the timing of cash flows. See here or the link on the right for the details.
This portfolio was hit by some recent stock drops.
PayPal (PYPL) had a bad earnings call and limited forward guidance of profits and the stock dropped a lot. We will be re-evaluating this stock.
Recent acquisitions Block (SQ) and Nike (NKE) fell with the market after we bought them
Alibaba (BABA) the massive Chinese e-commerce company has been buffeted by the deteriorating relationship between China & the USA and a crack down on tech companies in that country as well
Portfolio Six is 9 1/2 years old. The trustee contributed $10,000 and the beneficiary $5000 for a total of $15,000. The current value is $25,192 for a gain of $10,192 or 68%, which is 9.2% / year adjusted for the timing of cash flows. You can see performance here or on the link on the right.
Some stocks are on watch. Paypal (PYPL) had a huge price crash based on forward guidance (not a change in their business model), dropping more than 60% from its highs. OKTA (OKTA) is down about 40% off its highs, along with more of the speculative tech stocks (those that trade at a multiple of revenues not earnings). Some other stocks have gone off their recent highs but still trade at significant increases from where we’ve bought them (TSM and NVDA).
Our portfolios have gone down with the market since the highs in November 2021. We had an aggregate decline of 16% and the market has gone down about 8-10% during that time, depending on which benchmarks you use (US / Europe). We had some stocks that were hit particularly hard, so let’s go through them.
The Chinese stock market has been hit hard. We have two stocks in the portfolio, Alibaba (BABA) and Pinduoduo (PDD). China has cracked down on big tech and foreign listings in particular, although recently these stocks have done better since the government has now reversed and promised to support these companies (likely because they started laying off thousands of workers in China). Rather than trying to understand the Chinese market, it is time to sell unless you are in it for the long haul (Alibaba in particular is a large and successful company).
There were a number of technology companies whose prices went down a lot. These include Meta (FB), Snap (SNAP), Cloudflare (NET), and Okta (OKTA). Meta and Snap were tied to a broader issue on social networking and the fact that Apple changing its tracking made ads less accurate. Cloudflare is trading for a very high multiple of revenue (not profits) so any bumps along the way in forecasted growth can cause a significant drop in the stock price. Okta was also hit and tied to an acquisition but the core numbers remain strong. The story behind these stocks generally remains strong but they will likely continue to face a lot of turbulence.
PayPal (PYPL) was maddening. This is a well run company whose price went down an unprecedented amount without a significant challenge to their business model (unlike SNAP and FB who were impacted by the Apple tracking change). They did announce reduced future guidance but I was surprised by the fall.
We have other stocks that have gone down for various reasons, including Appian (APPN), Rocket Mortgage (RKT), Block (SQ). Block seems like a long term holding but APPN and RKT may be for those willing to ride out volatility.
We use the Vanguard Total Bond Index ETF (BND) rather than the money market fund which essentially returns almost zero. But with interest rates rising, we actually lost money on BND – about 3% (after netting out the interest we received) – so perhaps it is better to go back to the money market (VMMXX) instead and get maybe a .5% – 1% return with no risk of loss.
It wasn’t all bad news. Many of the portfolio stocks did well, especially the non technology stocks such as manufacturing and commodities. We had a buyout offer for Activision (ATVI) from Microsoft, so we might as well sell at that price.
Many of the core stocks bounced around and were down but not as significantly, including Mastercard (MA), Nvidia (NVDA), Tesla (TSLA), and Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing (TSM). We likely got in too early for Intel (INTC) but that seems to be a solid long term play at this price.
We are going to update the individual portfolios and as we do we will consider which stocks (if any) to sell per the above logic.
During 2021 the markets had a lot of ups and downs, but overall it was a great year for stocks.
Our portfolios in aggregate returned about 18% (adjusted for contributions in the fall of 2021 and amounts that were essentially un-invested in cash) during 2021. This compares roughly equivalent to the US markets that returned about 25% in aggregate and foreign markets that returned about 8% (by comparing against Vanguards VEU ETF which is large-cap stocks not including the USA), since our portfolios are a mix of them.
These portfolios are tracked in Google Sheets in two ways:
a single consolidated portfolio tracker in google sheets, which has the shares by stock for each portfolio and the cash associated with each portfolio, to get the total value. I take “snapshots” of value at different types of the year, as you can see in the graph above. This google sheets doc is pretty easy to keep up to date and lets me see the markets at a glance; I notice when it seems odd and often it is a stock split which needs to be reflected in the underlying data. Buys and sells only take a few minutes for me to update in the sheet. I then reconcile the portfolios against the records online from our financial records
8 unique google sheets documents, one for each portfolio. These sheets have all the details for each portfolio, including the price of each stock purchase and the sale price for those that have been sold, as well as matching dividends to each stock over time (to get total return). I also have the cash flows over the years to calculate total return (gains / losses) as well as an annual return adjusted for the timing of cash flows
I typically update the individual google sheet documents periodically when we do buys and sells, usually around the fall of each year when we have contributions, but we often sell individual stocks due to unique circumstances throughout the year. All 8 of the google sheets are aligned to the consolidated sheet and the brokerage records as of now.
Portfolio eight is 6 years old. The beneficiary contributed $3500 and the trustee $7000 for a total of $10,500. The current value is $18,548 for a gain of $8,048 or 76%, which is 14% / year adjusted for the timing of cash flows. Go here for a summary or to the link.
This year we sold Baozun and Sumo Logic and bought Nike, Square / Block and Tesla. Nvidia also split shares.
The portfolio is doing well. There are gains in Nvidia, Mastercard and Paypal (even though Paypal is down recently with hits to the software companies and payment processors).
Portfolio Seven is 6 years old. The beneficiary contributed $3500 and the trustee $7000 for a total of $10,500. The current value is $14,317 for a gain of $3817 or 36%, which is 7.8% / year when adjusted for the timing of cash flows. Go here for a summary or to the link.
This year we sold Bauzon (BZUN) and Sumo Logic (SUMO) and bought Nike (NKE), Block / Square (SQ), and Tesla (TSLA).
Gains have primarily come from Taiwan Semiconductor (TSM), PayPal (PYPL) and Mastercard (MA). PayPal is down about 40% recently with the reduction in payment and tech stocks but still is well run, but something to watch. We should strongly consider selling Alibaba (BABA) the regulatory climate in China is very harsh right now (may also be a long term buying opportunity).
Portfolio Six is nine years old. The beneficiary contributed $5000 and the trustee $10,000 for a total of $15,000. The current value is $28,020 which is a gain of $13,020 or 87%, which is 11.1% / year adjusted for the timing of cash flows. Go here for a summary or to the link.
This year we sold three stocks (Facebook, Sumo Logic and Baozun) and bought three stocks (Intel, Paypal and L’Oreal). Nvidia (NVDA) also split shares.
The portfolio is overall doing well. The largest gains have been tied to NVDA, OKTA, Taiwan Semiconductor (TSM), Union Pacific (UNP) and Procter & Gamble).
Portfolio Five is 12 years old. The beneficiary contributed $6500 and the trustee $13,000 for a total of $19,500. The current value is $40,195 for a gain of $20,695 which is 106% or 9.9% / year adjusted for the timing of cash flows. Go here for a summary or to the link on the left.
This year we had three sales – Alibaba (BABA) for a small gain, Sumo for a small loss, and Baozun (BZUN) for a larger loss.
We purchased 6 new stocks – Appian (APPN), Activision / Blizzard (ATVI), Intel (INTC), Snap, Block (formerly Square) (SQ), and Tesla (TSLA).
Generally the portfolio has been doing well. There are 19 stocks in the portfolio and it is quite diverse.
Recently we’ve seen declines in some former high flyers Cloudflare (NET), Paypal (PYPL), and OKTA (OKTA). We saw some new highs with Infosys (INFY), Union Pacific (UNP) and Procter and Gamble (PG).
Trust Funds For Kids 