It's too much hassle to compute rates of return and so these are just total contributions in US Dollars. Gaining investments outweigh losing investments 4.5:1 in dollar terms. Not surprisingly the CFS Conservative Fund contributes about a quarter of the gains as it is more than half my net worth in value. Forex contributed even more. All other is the net of interest received and interest and fees paid. Interestingly investments dominate the gainers at the top of the table and trades dominate the losers at the bottom of the table. Investments that lost money are: Ansell, Telecom NZ, and Croesus. All of these are the single industrial firm stocks I wrote about yesterday. Now you can see why I'm not enthusiastic about them. On the other hand, Ansell has generated significant profits in previous years and Mayne/Symbion and Powertel made great contributions this year. But all the mutual funds, closed end funds, fund management companies, and hedge fund investments made money. These are the main patterns I can see.
As far as learning from this record in order to improve my trading in 2007, the main lesson is that avoiding the losses on my two worst trades (each is actually the sum of several trades in that security) would significantly have improved my results - adding about 1.75% to the annual return on investment. I'd like to think I can now avoid the kind of mistake that generated the losses in trading News Corp. That is the whole point of developing a trading model, though money management is a big part of it too. On the investment side the loss on Croesus was unexpected, I really believed the company was turning around, sorting out production problems, and making significant new gold discoveries. I didn't realize the size of the hedging book and how that was going to bring down the company. The lesson is to be very wary of individual stocks of companies that seem to be experiencing any kind of problem.
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