Portfolio on January 1st

Our starting portfolio allocation for year 2020 was as follows:

• Stocks 96,7%
• Gold 1,0%
• Cash 2,3%

No bonds. We simply substitute bonds with quality dividend payers in our portfolio. The cash position was temporary and related to transactions near change of the year.

No big structural changes were made during 2019 (certainly not compared to what was done during 2018).


Geographical Allocation (stocks):

• Europe 57,3%
• North America 42,7%
• 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 (IT & Technology 54,8%) and specifically to semiconductor sector (27,5%).

Sector Allocation (stocks)

The plan is to sell technology stocks early 2020 and invest into other sectors. As much as I like and believe in our technology portfolio it has come time to balance the portfolio.

Top 5 positions - in order of weight in portfolio:

1. Apple (USA)
2. Western Digital (USA)
3. Micron (USA)
4. UPM (Finland)
5. NVIDIA (USA)

There is now 5 Finnish and 5 U.S companies  among largest 10 positions. The plan for 2020 is to increase weight and number of Finnish corporations at expense of the technology companies listed in the top 5.

2019 - Best year ever

Happy New Year 2020!

The year 2019 ended up to be the best year we have ever had in stock markets in terms of

• yearly gains (+36,2%)

• gains relative to our benchmark investment* - passive index investing (+8,6%)

• absolute gains 💰

Our best performing stocks were mainly from USA: Apple and most of our semiconductor plays (NVIDIA, Micron and Western Digital). Also some of our Finnish stocks did really well even though the Finnish market lagged most other markets with OMXH25 index returning "just" about 15%.

Portfolio performance 2009-2019.

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

In terms of cumulative yearly gains, we are now 17,7% above the benchmark investment. In the larger scheme of things (cumulative gains net of taxes 218,8% so far) this is very small deviation. Therefore, the key contributor to gains have been quite simply the decision to stay fully invested in the market.

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

As a new chart I have included the view to the absolute value of the portfolio so that the starting level on 31.12.2018 is scaled to 100. The orange bars single out money added to the portfolio each year. I would call this "the snowball view" as it gives very good idea on the benefits of compounding gains. 

It also puts in perspective our worst year (2018) and our best year (2019) so far. 

Portfolio absolute size (scaled 2008 = 100)

What we started with at end of 2008 (scaled to 100) has grown to 25-fold portfolio over the past 11 years.

Going into 2020 we continue to be almost 100% invested into stocks. I will cover our starting 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).