5 years blogging

I wrote my first blog post on 12th of February 2010 - exactly 5 years ago.
Since then my blog has got over 60,000 pageviews.

When looking back to what I have written I find some things odd. For example, I have written lots about gold even though that has never been major part of our portfolio. Same goes for mining companies.

Most of my investments to mining sector have proven to be if not mistakes then not as profitable as most of my other investments. That is truly a hard sector - but for some reason - continies to be a fascinating one for me.

Early on, I made quite a lot of changes to portfolio. Later I have slowed down rate of change a lot. I think there are three reasons for this. Five years ago, I had more time to follow the market and this lead to more activity. Secondly, when I had to justify changes in the blog, I started to be more critical towards acting on new ideas and towards change in general. Finally, there are now many excellent companies in the portfolio with good long term prospects and it simply is hard to find better ones. Changes make even less sense to positions that have accumulated significant capital gains.

Opposed to what many other people does. I keep the winners (keep the gains accumulating without taxman eating into those) and ditch the loosers (even at loss).

Over the years, the number of my blog posts per year have decreased. This year, I plan to turn around the trend and write more posts than last year ;-)

I went initially for direct invetment into many companies in developing markets. Most of those came out as problematic positions. Either because of the company selection itself or because of taxation of dividends out of those companies in Finland. The biggest lesson that I learnt from those investments is that for inverstor like me, passive ETFs are the best vehicle to get market exposure outside of markets that are familiar.

Some things have been not changed.

I consider still Warren Buffett's annual letters and other materials as some of the best investment advice one can find. I have not always followed his advice and most of the time this has lead to mistakes.

There has also been one crisis after another over these 5 years
- aftermath of US crisis,
- then Euro debt crisis,
- then Greece,
- then Ukraine
- then again Greece...
- (and likely forgot something in above list)

Still, our porfolio has done very well over the years.

So far, almost pure stocks portfolio has paid off - big time compared to stocks/bonds/cash portfolio alternatives.

Let's see what the future brings.