You won’t know it from the wild swings experienced by the stock markets in the recent past but the Sleepy Mini Portfolio gained 1.65% since my previous update. To be fair, it should be pointed out that the portfolio showed gains for the last quarter only after the significant rally of the past couple of days. If I had computed returns the previous day the portfolio would have shown a loss of 1.1%.
It is, perhaps, unsurprising to see that bonds have held up their value in the past quarter but it is surprising to see that US markets have held up relatively well compared to Canadian and other foreign markets. Note that the Sleepy Mini Portfolio started out with an initial investment of $1,000 in August 2007 and $1,000 was added to the portfolio every quarter ever since. A total of $17,000 has been invested in the portfolio and as of November 30, 2011, here’s how it looks:
TDB909 – Canadian Bonds – $3,622 (20.0%)
TDB900 – Canadian Equities – $3,428 (19.0%)
TDB902 – US Equities – $5,719 (31.6%)
TDB911 – International Equities – $5,315 (29.4%)
Total – $18,083
Total Invested – $17,000
We’ll now add another $1,000 to the portfolio and rebalance it according to our original asset allocation — 20% bonds, 20% Canadian stocks, 30% US stocks and 30% international stocks — using this rebalancing spreadsheet. Here are the results:
Transactions
TDB909 – TD Canadian Bond Index (e-Series) – Buy units for $194.23.
TDB900 – TD Canadian Index (e-Series) – Buy units for $389.12.
TDB911 – TD International Index (e-Series) – Buy units for $416.66.
We will not be adding any new money to the TD e-Series US Index (TDB902) because the new addition ($6.39) is much less than the minimum additional investment of $100. So, we’ll simply add that amount to the new money added to the TD e-Series International Index (TDB911) fund.
In a comment in one of the earlier posts, a reader wondered how much this portfolio has returned since inception. Using the Excel XIRR function, the annualized return works out to 2.8%. Hardly earth shattering but it is early days for the portfolio yet. I would expect a portfolio such as this to return 3.5% in real terms over the long term.
