Portfolio Return Highest Among US Stock Funds

Market Beating Stocks Lives Up to Name; Leaves Stock Funds In Dust

So how do our returns compare? Recent reports on stock fund rankings and S&P Index losses make our 12.9% annualized return look exceptional! The September 2009 edition of Kiplinger Personal Finance magazine ranks the performance of the 450 biggest and best performing stock based funds. The article, Stock Fund Rankings, further separates the stock funds into funds that invest primarily in US stocks and those that represent more of an International flavor. Kiplinger highlights the 3 year annualized return across all 450 funds for the period June 2006 to June 2009. For comparison, we calculated a 12.9% annualized return over that same 3 year period on our portfolio. At first glance, that might not seem so great, but remember that period covers the worst recessionary period since the Great Depression. For a market comparison, Kiplinger highlights that the S&P 500 Stock Index carried an annualized loss of -8.2% over the same time period.

Clearly, we beat the market by a large margin, but how did our portfolio compare against the professional fund managers? Fortunately, the Kiplinger article provides a basis for which to compare. Kiplinger identified 450 funds for which 322 were US based stock funds. Of those 322 funds, NOT ONE beat our results! That is right, our Retirement Portfolio beat ALL 322 stock funds in performance over the most recent three year period! That is truly exceptional. You might also ask, how did we do against all 450 professionally managed funds reported in this article, which includes the internationally based stock funds? Our performance was better than all 450 funds with only four exceptions! All four exceptions represented China based funds, no surprise given the strength of that economy and market over this difficult period. So all in all, we outperformed all 322 US based stock funds, as well as 446 out of the total 450 funds that were presented by Kiplinger magazine. Needless to say we are extremely happy with our performance. Furthermore, we are very confident in how well our stock selection and portfolio management strategy stacks up in the marketplace!