Portfolio 2 Updated April 2017

Portfolio Two 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 $33,334 for a gain of $13,834 which is 71% or 7.4% / year when adjusted for the timing of cash flows.  You can see the portfolio detail here or go to the links on the right.

This portfolio is different than the other portfolios because it has shifted to ETF’s and CD’s.  The ETF’s are broadly tied to the US and non-US stock indexes.  There is also a CD that returns 1.55% / year for $10,000 in the portfolio.

Since markets have gone up over the last year, this portfolio has done well (it tracks the market).  All of the ETF’s are near 100% of their 52 week high, which means that they are at or near their highs and the indexes have been rising continually over this time period.

Unlike the other portfolios, which are invested in individual stocks, these ETF’s do have annual expenses.  You can’t “see” the expenses because you receive the returns “net” of expenses, but this is disclosed.  Over the 1 1/2 years that we’ve had this portfolio the low cost ETF’s cost $86, which is very low for a portfolio of over $30k.  If you go back ten or fifteen years ago mutual funds would routinely cost 2% or more each year which would be $600 / year on a portfolio of this size.  It is a testament to the efficiency of ETF’s (which drove competition in the mutual fund markets, mutual fund expenses have been driven down proportionally, as well) that these sorts of rock bottom expenses are now commonplace if you know where to look.

In a technical note, the CD does fluctuate in value (a bit), but I record it at cost ($10,000) since we intend to hold it to maturity.  The cost fluctuations thus do not matter.

Finally, in another note, when I moved this portfolio over to Google Sheets, I noticed that I had been overstating the contributions in the “cash flows” calculation since 2012.  Thus the recorded return since inception now looks higher.  The value of the fund was always correct it was just the calculation of total gains to date that was incorrect.