indexfundfan @ indextown

This month had been an extremely busy month for me, and that has kept me from updating my portfolio performance for August 2008 until today.

Anyway, my portfolio lost 1.76% in August 2008, bringing the year-to-date (YTD) return to a loss of 6.58%. This makes it another worst year to date (YTD) return my portfolio has ever experienced since I started tracking monthly performances in Jan 2004.

The YTD return of the benchmark, a 50:50 split between the Vanguard LifeStrategy Moderate Growth fund and the Vanguard LifeStrategy Gowth fund, is -9.19%.

Individual Asset Classes

As we can see from the chart below, the worst performances came from VWO (Emerging Markets) and VGPMX/PME (Precious Metals and Mining equity). These posted losses of around 8% each. Foreign developed markets equity (VEA & VINEX) also did poorly, losing between 3% to 4%. What worked in August are US LargeCaps, SmallCaps and US REITs. These did relatively well in an otherwise dismal month. They gained between 2% to 4%.

Portfolio Movements

Sold US SmallCaps & US REITs. Added to PME, and foreign equity, including VEA, VWO and GWX.

The allocation, as of the end of August, is shown below:

This entry was posted on Monday, September 29th, 2008 at 9:01 am and is filed under Investing, My Portfolio, Portfolio Updates. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.