Portfolio return for May 2008
My portfolio gained 1.82% in May 2008, bringing the year-to-date (YTD) return to 2.52%. This is one of the lowest May YTD return in recent years. The YTD return of the benchmark, a 50:50 split between the Vanguard LifeStrategy Moderate Growth fund and the Vanguard LifeStrategy Gowth fund, is still in the red at -2.15%.
Individual Asset Classes
The asset class with the highest return in May was PME (VGPMX, XME). VGPMX gained 9% while XME gained almost 15%. The second highest asset class return came from US SmallCaps, which gained about 4%. The rest of the equity asset classes returned less than 2%.
Portfolio Movements
Sold down PME (VGPMX, XME) allocation of 6% to 5%. Originally I had wanted to allocate 6% to PME but finally decided to just stick to the 5% ‘rule-of-thumb’ for alternative asset classes. The 1% reduction was moved to US LargeCaps (0.5%) and International LargeCaps (0.5%).
Other movement: sold US SmallCaps from my 401(k).
The allocation, as of the end of May, is shown below:
Stumble it!
June 20th, 2008 at 5:35 pm
My apologies, but I couldn’t find if you had a post outlining your criteria for when you rebalance? Is it based on % change?
June 22nd, 2008 at 9:40 am
Jonathan, I don’t have a post on my re-balancing criteria.
I consider myself “very aggressive” on re-balancing. Usually new money every month is used to restore my asset allocation. If that still cannot restore the balance to within 5% for each asset class (e.g. my fixed income allocation of 30% would have a band from 28.5% to 31.5%), I would use my tax-deferred assets to restore the balance. For this to work, I have a portion of every asset class in tax-deferred space.
June 22nd, 2008 at 6:14 pm
Thanks for sharing, I was just curious.
June 26th, 2008 at 4:43 am
[...] shares his May 2008 Portfolio return. So many asset [...]
September 25th, 2009 at 11:15 pm
Really nice posts. I will be checking back here regularly.