2024 Year End Performance

In my 2023 year-end review, I said that I would be happy if I can generate a 10%+ return in 2024. Well, I am grateful that I was able to generate a return of 20.74% for 2024 even though this underperformed the S&P 500 return of ~ 23%. When the portfolio was smaller, I was nimbler and was able to consistently beat the S&P 500. Now with more of a buy & hold approach and old age, it’s getting harder to beat the index. It does make me think about going into the index funds, but I enjoy this game too much and doubt I will ever go all index.

I can once again thank Apple for making a strong year end come back, which really helped the portfolio. Visa and Mastercard also generated decent returns. The only disappointment was Constellation Brands, which sold off on the risk of tariffs since all of its products are manufactured in Mexico. I still intend to hold into Constellation Brands as it provides a nice steady dividend. I did sell Ginkgo Bioworks to take advantage of the tax loss but may get back in at some point.

When I initially purchased these positions, I never thought that I would hang on to them this long. A nice metric that I focus on is Dividend Yield on Cost. This is looking at the current dividend and the cost basis of the position. With these yields, I really have no reason the sell off any of these positions. I view these as growth and income positions.

Holdings as of 12/31/24

I continued to be fairy active selling naked Puts on the high beta tech stocks (i.e. Tesla). This helped to generate some nice income, but obviously comes with risk. As I said before, all you need is one black swan event and it’s over. It looks like everyone is using this strategy to generate income as seen with the explosive growth in the options volume. I do wonder when the party will be over. In this game, one wrong move came wipe out years of hard work. I’ve experienced the Asian, Russian, 2000 tech bubble and the 2008 financial crisis. The COVID sell off was nothing compared to the 2000 tech bubble and the 2008 financial crisis. It may be prudent to start scaling back on this highly leveraged strategy.

I think this really sums things up for the year. As you can see from my monthly updates, it’s a really boring portfolio as nothing really changes from month to month.

Once again, I will be happy if I can generate a 10%+ return in 2025!

Have a Happy New Year, Good Health and Fortune to All!

 

2024 Performance = +20.74% with the running monthly returns as follows:

January +0.02%
February +0.99%
March -0.33%
April -3.07%
May +5.16%
June +3.52%
July +2.42%
August +2.52%
September +2.11%
October -1.76%
November +6.20%

December +1.61%

 

Annual performance for the past thirteen years is as follows:

2012 +61%
2013 +44.61%
2014 +29.47%
2015 +33.48%
2016 +14.61%
2017 +42.12%
2018 -4.11%
2019 +40.17%
2020 +32.81%
2021 +13.58%
2022 -14.14%

2023 +29.76%

2024 +20.74%

CAGR from 2012 to 2024 = 24.84%