Portfolio overview

Our starting portfolio allocation for year 2019 is as follows:

• Stocks 98,5%
• Gold 1,4%
• Cash 0,1%

No bonds. We simply substitute bonds with quality dividend payers in our portfolio.

The big changes compared to year ago are:

• Emerging markets exposure ramped to zero (money shifted to U.S. market)
• Exposure to technology sector ramped up to 48% of entire portfolio.
• All investments are now directly made to individual stocks (compared to 19,4% via ETFs on 1.1.2018).

Geographical Allocation (stocks):

• Europe 58,1%
• North America 41,9%
• Emerging markets 0%

Actually, place of incorporation is pretty meaningless for most corporations we have invested in. Most operate and sell globally.


Sector Allocation is heavily tilted towards technology companies:

Sector Allocation (stocks)

Top 5 positions - in order of weight in portfolio:

1. Siili Solutions (Finland)
2. Berkshire Hathaway (USA)
3. Nokia (Finland)
4. Apple (USA)
5. UPM (Finland)

There are now 7 technology companies (semiconductor/product/services) among largest 10 positions. Out of these 4 are in semiconductor business. Thus, short term volatility to be expected ..

Portfolio performance 2009-2018

Happy New Year 2019!

It's once again time to check how our portfolio fared in the previous year against passive index investing.

The year 2018 was a roller coaster ride of ups and downs in the market. We ended deeper into red than ever before in the 10 years that I have kept record of our performance.

The bencmark investment* was down 6,1% and our portfolio dived 10,8%. 

Portfolio performance 2009-2017. 

Note: "Difference" column uses exact values as input rather than figures rounded to 1 decimal that are displayed.

Many of our largest positions did quite poorly compared to the broad market. Also, we jumped too early into General Electric and saw quite a slide there. Semiconductors - especially Western Digital Corporation (down 53%) - did their share of damage. My decision to take many small cap companies in Finland into portfolio also turned out at least badly timed. Nokia Corporation was pretty much the only one beating the market with clear margin (up 29%).

In terms of cumulative yearly gains, we are now 1,9% below the benchmark investment. In the larger scheme of things (cumulative gains net of taxes 134% so far) this is very small deviation. However, the long term goal is to outperform the benchmark I have set for our investments.

Cumulative gains of our portfolio (blue line) vs. benchmark investment (red line). 31.12.2008 = 100.

Going into 2019 we continue to be almost 100% invested into stocks. I will cover our current allocation in the next post.


*) The "benchmark investment" is an imaginary passive ETF that closely tracks the performance of MSCI all country world (ACWI) index in euros (more info here).