BORING? YES! HOPELESS? NOT BY A LONG SHOT!
If our current portfolio was an entertainer, we would have been booed off stage and asked never to come back. Not because the performance was terrible, but rather due to the fact that the performance has been boring. We have seen our investment portfolio more or less meander sideways for the first month and a half of 2011.
When sideways periods like this occur for a period of weeks or months, it's important to consider where the portfolio was prior. Analyzing a portfolio of stocks is really no different than analyzing an individual stock. Often times, the pattern you see in the behavior of the whole portfolio can tell you lots of things about where the portfolio is headed as a whole, similar to price patterns and technical analysis of individual stocks.
Our portfolio, after bringing in triple digit percentage gains in only the last 6 months of 2010, has now gone sideways. It is literally scraping the top of its all time highs just a couple of percentage points away from a new high. While it has been a boring first month and a half of 2011, I can't think of a more bullish scenario for our portfolio over the long-term than this type of consolidation following such steep gains during the second half of 2011.
Boring...yes. Hopeless, not by a long shot. Think we'll be seeing some upside here sooner rather than later. A sampling of our current portfolio can be viewed here.
