Review of Model Portfolios at January 2017

Happy New Year Everyone.  It's time to open up our portfolios and examine what has happened since we last checked in.   We are tracking stocks in 3 different portfolios which I have set up during the month of May in years 2014, 2015 and 2016.  The screen shots below are taken on January 8, 2017.

Wall street and Bay street have embraced Donald Trump's victory  as the next president of the United States.  Stocks have been in a bull market since the end of October 2016.

May 2014

The good news for the May 2014 portfolio is that most of the stocks have now in positive territory.
The overall return for the past 2.5 years is now 11.5% or approximately 4.5% per year.  It could be better but it could be worse.  Total dividends returned is almost $750.

 WFT is the worst performing stock at this time and has historically been subject to a lot of volatility in it's stock price.   LNR has made significant gains in the past 6 months and is just a few points shy of breaking even again.  Our technology holding GIB.A is up 78% and GC is up 63%.

If we look at the past year's performance of this portfolio, you can see that it pretty much did nothing. The TSX on the other hand had a stellar year returning 19%, mostly due to gains in the resource and energy positions.

Here's the May 2014 graph since inception.  Again it shows us 2016 was a pretty down year.

If however we compare the May 2014 portfolio returns to the TSX for the entire lifespan of the portfolio, we are still ahead of the TSX for the same period of time.  13% vs 6% so we should be happy about that.  Our dividend yield amounts to about 2% for this portfolio.

May 2015

The May 2015 portfolio has been doing well overall, except for our technology holding DH.  This stock has been the target of short sellers and is down 45%.  Most of the other stocks are showing double digit returns with ATD.B, WPK AND NA being the star performers.  

With a modest return of 3% google finance shows us the monetary return as $521. However you can see that our dividends did really well on this portfolio giving back $675, which more than doubles our portfolio yield.

 The performance graph of 2016 shows that the May 2015 portfolio was fairly stable throughout the past year except for the sharp drop in mid November.  I think it has some correlation to our DH holding.

Without any energy or resource holdings in our portfolio, we did not experience the same growth as the TSX in the past year.  The May 2015 portfolio returned 3.6% vs the TSX 19%.

If we look at the performance graph since portfolio inception.  The May 2015 portfolio shows 7.8% which I believe includes our dividend yield vs the TSX average of 3%.

May 2016

Our newest portfolio is giving us a 5% return, not bad given that it is only about 7 months since it's inception. The worst performing stock is NWC which was the stock I subbed in at the last minute. The three best performing stocks in this portfolio are ITP, RNW and ECI each giving us double digit gains.

If you will recall, I had a second look at ET when I started my portfolio creation and decided it wasn't where I wanted it to be in terms of performance.  However NWC hasn't really given us any stellar returns either. In fact it is underperforming ET right now.  ET is only down 1% whereas NWC is down over 6%. Doh.

 The May 2016 performance graph since May of this year.

Again without any resource or energy stocks in our portfolio, we didn't have the same returns as the TSX, but we were pretty close.  The TSX returned 11% in the past 7 months, and the May 2016 portfolio did just over 8%.  The dividend yield on this portfolio is therefore around 3%.

It should be noted that the performance graph characteristics of the portfolio tracked pretty closely to the TSX except that after Donald Trump's election win, our portfolio started to underperform the TSX.

Summary

Portfolio and total overall returns (inclusive of dividend yield)

May 2014 - 13%
May 2015 - 7%
May 2016 - 8% (for 7 months)

It should be interesting to see what unfolds in 2017, which I expect will be a year of revelations and surprises, thanks to the Donald.