What is your ROI lately?

cab83_750 · 04:29 PM

Excluding your "house being upsided down", how are you doing lately (stocks, bonds, 401K)?

My YTD ROI ranges between -12% and -17%. I definitely know that I am doing better than my friends and coworkers.

How about you guys? This friggin' market has been a killer!!!!

P.S.,

I have my daughter's car purchase on hold, my personal car purchase on hold, kitchen remodeling on hold (living- and dining rooms still on-going), winter vacation on hold, everything that I could pretty much on hold. I guess for a 45 y.o. person, I am way too conservative.

Hugh R · 06:03 PM

I'm in there, maybe -20% I'd be much worse off but my portfolio is about 25% in CDs and such from the cash sale of an old car last year.

Porsche-O-Phile · Porsche-O-Phile's Garage

Down about 35% from last year. Really, really bad.

Jim Richards · 10-03-2008, 04:26 PM

I'm down about the same amount, cab.

cab83_750 · 04:31 PM

As a clarification, please exclude your 'house loses'. This tends to be skewed as some of us bought our house long long long time ago; and some bought at the peak of the market before crap started happening.

Let's be more concerned about non-house stuff.

Jim Bremner · 10-03-2008, 04:30 PM

but cash poor

Porsche-O-Phile · Porsche-O-Phile's Garage

Includes stocks, options, 401k and job revenue. Down about 35%.

cab83_750 · 10-03-2008, 04:36 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Porsche-O-Phile

Includes stocks, options, 401k and job revenue. Down about 35%.

POP,

Man, I don't want to sound like your wife

, but "that is huge!" On a relativity-note, I hope your basis is in millions (e.g., instead of $1M, you still have $65,000.00).

masraum · 10-03-2008, 05:01 PM

-15% or so on investments, but I'm making at least double what I was making in March, so I'm also paying off debt and building savings (that last part is helping with the -15%) But I don't have that money invested. I'm not worried, it'll come back up at some point. It's not like I'm close to retirement.

widgeon13 · 10-03-2008, 05:13 PM

-16%

MRM · 10-03-2008, 05:18 PM

The only money I manage myself is the money I put into my Keogh at the end of the year. I started my business three years ago so I have two full years of cotributions. I started investing it actively the first of the year when the PPOT stock pick thread started. I used all of 2006's Keogh contribution (which fortunately was relatively small) and bought TCF Bank (TCB) at 17.90. It promptly went up to about $22 or $24 and I thought I beat the market. Subprime hit, then the mortgage crisis, then the general meltdown, and it dropped to $16 and the hovered around there before the bottom dropped out and it went to about $12. After watching it for a while, I put all of 2007's Keogh contribution (which fortunately was about twice as much as 2006's contribution) into TCF at $12.90. And it promptly went to about $9. Then regional banks with decent ballance sheets came back into favor and it spiked to the mid teens, kept going, and hit $20. I watched and got nervous the week before the bailout was proposed, and sold it all at $19.10, making a little over 35% return on the combined lots of stock. It's now safely in a money market fund. I can hold it there for two years and still get a good yearly return. I am planning to hold it a while and get a good feel for something else before I dive in again. I think we're going to see a slow bleed for a long time.

The rest of the story is that two days after I liquidated everything the bailout was announced and it shot up to $28. Woulda shoulda coulda. I'm still glad I got out with a good profit after not buying at the bottom or selling at the peak, just buying and selling when it made sense. It closed today at $17.38, which was down over a dollar and several dollars down for the week. I think it will continue to slide, but I think financial stocks are the place to be now.

dmcummins · 10-03-2008, 05:32 PM

I'm down around 10%-15%. I retired last year and became alittle more conservative in my investments. I can last several years without having to sell any stocks, but if things are bad for a number of years, I'll just have to die earlier. I am lucky in that I sold some residential lots in 2005 and paid off my house, so I reduced the amount I need to withdraw.

Porsche-O-Phile · Porsche-O-Phile's Garage

I wish. My total holdings are less than 5% of that number.

Most of my 401k was in very aggressive, high-risk funds like emerging markets funds. Did great last few years but got slaughtered this year. I've since moved out into (slightly) better funds.

Options - made a few good picks but got killed by the bad ones. The downside of leverage. My losses this year are outnumbering the wins by about 3:1. I should be (or more correctly should HAVE BEEN) much more willing to do put/short positions. I mostly stuck with calls because they were more conventional and didn't scare me as much, even though I seriously did consider shorts on financials in a big way - even shorts on the indexes... But it's "coulda'/woulda'/shoulda'" - I just mulled it over, talked about it but didn't pull the trigger. And so depended on calls/long positions and as such, I eat dirt.

Last year we had a lot of OT in this office which netted me a lot of extra $$$. We're still busy for now (thankfully) but as part of a cost-controlling measure all OT has been slashed. Of course employees still have the option to work extra hours if they want but it's unpaid. So I typically don't.

Net result is a big y-o-y decline and I've cut back on expenditures in a big way. Things are definitely not as good as last year and I don't expect to see days like that again anytime soon unfortunately. I've pulled virtually all my investment $$$ off the table for now until I figure out what to do next. In the "easy days" the last 2-3 years I just tried like hell to "make what I can while I can" knowing that it wouldn't be so easy forever. Guess I was right. I'm still ahead overall, but nowhere near my highs...

Christien · Christien's Garage

The only money we have invested outside of the company I own is our retirement fund, which isn't much (under 10K) and it's just a high-interest savings account, so we're not down anything. I'm SO glad I'm not in the markets, though we also have very little actual equity in the company. Our municipal house evaluation came in the mail this week (what they base our property taxes on). Our house is up $56K since we bought it in 04 according to them. That's not likely realistic if we decided to sell, but a $40K increase is.

cab83_750 · 10-03-2008, 06:01 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Christien

The only money we have invested outside of the company I own is our retirement fund, which isn't much (under 10K) and it's just a high-interest savings account, so we're not down anything. I'm SO glad I'm not in the markets, though we also have very little actual equity in the company. Our municipal house evaluation came in the mail this week (what they base our property taxes on). Our house is up $56K since we bought it in 04 according to them. That's not likely realistic if we decided to sell, but a $40K increase is.

They say it's up because they base the tax on the new valuation, correct? BTW, I hope things are better in Canada. I have lived in my house since 91, and the losses were 'paper money.' I can still make a lot if I were to sell at the new selling valuation, but man, I should have sold it 2 years ago. I

Christien · Christien's Garage

Yeah, absolutely it's a "generous" evaluation because they can charge us more taxes. This is Canada! That's what we do here!

We bought our house in 04 for 230K and the evaluation came in at 317K - sorry, when I said it had increased 56K that was from the 05 evaluation which pegged it at 261K, not from when we bought it. Realistically, we could sell it now for maybe $280-$300K, but then we'd still have to buy another house, and real estate here hasn't been like it has in the US - it's risen a lot over the last few years, but we didn't have any of the mortgage practices you guys did, so it's much more true-market driven. Hamilton has seen some of the highest increases in the country over the last 3 years, though things are leveling off a bit. But there's no forecasted decrease or bubble bursting. There's no reason to believe that housing prices around here will fall, at least not any more than standard market fluctuations, with the added hit of a recession.

I wish I could say we were smart, but we were just lucky! We bought in an area that took off, just a few years before it took off.

Things aren't as bad in Canada as they are in the US, but our markets are taking a hit - the Toronto Stock Exchange was down 800 points on Wednesday, rebounded some 400 yesterday and is down again today. I just read that the total loss on the week for the TSX was 10.9%. Expectations are for somewhat of a recession but the question is how much. It all depends on who you listen to - we're also in the midst of a federal election campaign (we vote on Oct. 14) so partisan rhetoric and spin are flying fast, and you never know who you can trust, if anyone.

pavulon · 04:37 AM

moved 75% of my retirement (95% of my 403b) to PTTRX in October 2007...could have made worse choices than that.

LakeCleElum · 10-03-2008, 08:55 PM

Investments down about 13%. What hurts is the wife retired April 1. Put the house up for sale at $595, lowered to $575 in Aug. and now at $549.....Not a single offer, even after I put $20K in improvements since it went on the market......

Gonna lease it to a fellow Pelican and move to our retirement home in the next 10 days.....

BlueSkyJaunte · 10-03-2008, 09:22 PM

I'm at -20% to -24.8% on 401k (multiple "accounts"...I don't feel like doing the math) YTD.

All other assets are liquid (cash, ammo) or land. 20 acres in Wyoming and 1 in AZ.

The good news is we have <$130k left on our mortgage, and the last house to sell on our street went for $475k. So we can afford to take a big hit if necessary.

the · 09:33 PM

Doing fine, I may be up 1% a month, down 1% the next.

I've been in cash, tbills and short term CDs for almost a year and a half now. (I couldn't get completely out, there were some things I hold that I can't sell without triggering tax consequences, like Kinder Morgan. I also put money into a bear mutual fund, called Prudent Bear. So I have some small flux).

This meltdown was totally predictable, been discussed many times on this forum in the past year. I was 12-18 months early in getting out, and missed out on what would have been a decent year of gains, but that's ok.

Speaking of predictions, has the "Stock Pick" thread been update lately? The one where we picked stocks at the beginning of this year? I lol'd at some of the picks (like Apple at $180).

I don't know how my pick is doing, but I only had one criteria for the pick: What will do well when by late 2008 we are in economic meltdown? I figured a gold stock would be good.