Losing While Winning

Of course, an excess return simply means that you are beating the market on a risk-adjusted basis and if the market is down badly and your excess return is not sufficiently large you will also be losing even though you are beating the market. From November through March I've experienced a total of five losing months in a row for the portfolio in Australian Dollar or currency neutral terms. So has the S&P 500. In US Dollar terms, February was a slight gain, as it was for the MSCI World Index. The only other time I lost five months in a row was from November 2002 to March 2003. There were no periods of four losing months in a row in my investment history (since 1996) and only one of three months (July to September 2001). The indices did have more 4 and 3 month losing periods. So this period does feel especially dispiriting. This month is showing a gain for the indices and myself so far, but progress is still very fragile. The S&P is only up 0.89% so far for the month.