How Did You Do in 2017?

Asset allocation, risk, diversification and rebalancing. Pros/cons of hiring a financial advisor. Seeking advice on your portfolio?
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AltaRed
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How Did You Do in 2017?

Post by AltaRed »

It's that time of year and I might as well start it off. From another thread... while not all numbers are yet in, the portfolio turned in an overall forex adjusted investment portfolio gain of about 12.8% (about 14.5% unadjusted for forex) as calculated by Quicken. That is with a portfolio that started about 80/20 equity/FI and ended the year at about 85/15 equity/FI. A few equities will be sold in 2018 to bring FI back up to the 20% range.

Edited to add longer term data since I am one of FWF that preaches longer term views :D

5 year CAGR 11.8% forex adjusted*, 9.6% unadjusted.

8 year CAGR 10.0% forex adjusted, 8.2% unadjusted.

* per Quicken

It would be better to use a 10 year CAGR (rather than 8 year) to include a full business cycle. IOW, anything that doesn't include the 2008/2009 cycle is skewed due to the long bull market, but my 2008 data is not representative due to a divorce settlement and picking 1/1/2009 would be data mining.
Last edited by AltaRed on 31 Dec 2017 14:03, edited 1 time in total.
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Wallace
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Re: How Did You Do in 2017?

Post by Wallace »

Also according to "Quicken" - 11.87%
12-14 blue chip stocks, all dividend-bearing.
Only 2 American stocks - AAPL and MGA. I should have had more. Hindsight, as usual.
2017 was my first year taking money out of RRIF with only other income being CPP and OAS. Despite that, we ended up the year ahead of the game. Each good year that goes by makes it less likely that a bad year will have a damaging effect.
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Re: How Did You Do in 2017?

Post by Lazy Ninja »

Up 11.1% for the year. I now have 10 years of data as a DIY investor. Average annualized returns of +9.3% over the last five years and +7.7% over the last 10.

Big winners among individual securities in 2017 were Dollarama, Visa, MasterCard and Union Pacific. Laggards were CVS health, A & W, Disney and Starbucks.

Portfolio is currently around 3% cash, 27% fixed income, 30% Canadian equity, 27% U.S. equity and 13% International equity. It's hovered pretty close to 70% equity for the duration of the aforementioned 10 year period. No major changes planned for 2018.
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Re: How Did You Do in 2017?

Post by scomac »

7.45% annualized return for 2017 on a total portfolio (excluding HISA) allocation of 65% equity/35% fixed income. This is a combination of DIY and managed money with ~1/3 in foreign currencies. 5 Yr. CAGR right at 10%. Since inception start of record keeping (Dec. 2004) 7.60% CAGR.
Last edited by scomac on 01 Jan 2018 10:48, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: How Did You Do in 2017?

Post by milton »

Non-reg: 11.91% (40% ZCN, 30% basket of 15 prefs, 20% basket of 7 REITs, 10% basket of 15 non financial/energy/mining Canadian small caps)
TFSA: 5.66% (50% ZCN, 15% GIC ladder, 15% VAB, 20% basket of large cap Canadian gold miners)
RSP: 13.16% (20% VEA, 15% VWO, 15% VNQI, 10% VTI, 10% VXF, 15% GIC ladder, 15% VAB)

It's been a stupendous year since the portfolio is designed to return an average of 5-6% (~2% for dividends, ~2% for inflation, and ~2% for GDP growth). Good to see other folks have done well :D
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Re: How Did You Do in 2017?

Post by ig17 »

I use Quicken to record all financial transactions but keep a separate XIRR spreadsheet to calculate portfolio performance. Quicken performance report is a black box and, for the life of me, I can't make sense of the number it spits out. Quicken number doesn't match my back-of-the-envelope sanity check.

2017 XIRR across all family accounts (including cash HISAs): 18.1%

For comparison, Quicken reports 22.4% (transaction exchange rate OFF) and 13.9% (transaction exchange rate ON) for the same portfolio.

Asset allocation:
Start of the year: 83% stocks, 17% cash
End of the year: 91% stocks, 9% cash

0% crypto :wink:
0% weed :wink:

Multi-year XIRRs, all family accounts including HISAs:

3 years: 11.7%
5 years: 12.4%
6 years: 11.7%

Longer returns are not available due to poor record-keeping in the years prior to Quicken adoption.
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Re: How Did You Do in 2017?

Post by ghariton »

Results for the year 2017:

10.3 % in CAD, 17.2 % in USD.

I finally have ten years of clean data, from end 2007 to end 2017. The geometric average (what people usually report here) are

8.1 % in CAD, 5.4 % in USD.

The ten-year results are depressed by the awful numbers for 2008, i.e. minus 9.8 in CAD and minus 27.2 in USD. I think that those years are outliers, and unlikely to be representative of next year. Instead, I prefer to summarize my ten-year results by the median annual return, which turn out to be 10.4 % in CAD and 8.1 % in USD.

FWIW, my allocation was 30 % fixed income at the start of 2017 and 28 % at the end of the year. My target return for planning purposes is 4 % plus inflation, which I surpassed this year. As a result, I can afford to give away a good chunk of money.

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Re: How Did You Do in 2017?

Post by nile »

2017 returns across all portfolios was 6 percent
all equity all canadian
advice/ideas mainly from here and tom connolly
yearly dividend income was up 20% with new and reinvested money
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Re: How Did You Do in 2017?

Post by Spidey »

XIRR over all family accounts: 1year: 9.8%, 5 Year: 9.5% 10 year: 4.9%

I'm 35% fixed income of which 8.2% is cash (a little heavier than usual). 10 year a bit lower than I would prefer but going back 9 years ago to 2008, I would have gladly accepted it.
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Re: How Did You Do in 2017?

Post by chufinora »

XIRR over all accounts 1 year 8.8%, 5 year 9.6%, 10 year 7.0%.

Current allocation 63% stocks, 14% bonds, 23% cash (HISA) (Target allocation 65/20/15 I think I should buy more FI but have been slow to do so), Expense ratios remain very low, only made 3 stock transactions all year. A boring year but I would take it if they were all like this.

Does anyone know where the FPX balanced and growth index are? (Can't find them on FP page, or with Google only found values to end of November on Croft financial pages)
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Re: How Did You Do in 2017?

Post by longinvest »

The time-weighted 2017 return of my portfolio was 6.6% as calculated using the Bogleheads wiki's easy-to-use Calculating personal returns spreadsheet. That's in line with the 6.8% return reported by Portfolio Visualizer.

It's normal to see a small difference between my portfolio's return and its benchmark's friction-less return due various factors such as the imperfect rebalancing of my portfolio, bid/ask spreads (ZRR's are noteworthy), distributions counted on the ex-dividend date by Portfolio Visualizer and in the payment month (often the next month, reflected in the final monthly balance) by the spreadsheet*.

* For instance, my portfolio's December 31, 2017 final account balances don't include the December distributions of VCN, VXC, VAB, and ZRR as they'll be paid in January 2018.

Here are the individual returns of its four assets in 2017, according to Portfolio Visualizer:
  • Domestic stocks (VCN): 8.5%
  • International stocks (VXC): 16.0%
  • Nominal bonds (VAB): 2.3%
  • Inflation-indexed bonds (ZRR): 0.8%
It's interesting to see how 2017 was a good year to take risk. The riskiest of assets, international stocks (exposed to currency risk in addition to stock risk) had the highest return and the least risky of assets (government inflation-indexed bonds) had the lowest return.

As usual, the performance of my portfolio was average given its equal allocation to these four assets. It wasn't as high as VXC's nor as low as ZRR's. That's by design.

Disclosure: I don't count the cash I hold in my chequing and savings accounts as part of my portfolio. But the amount is small as my portfolio is my emergency fund.
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Re: How Did You Do in 2017?

Post by LAJ »

I have to admit, I don't know the exact amount. I track the growth of the RRSPs (10.25% so far) but not the TFSAs or non-reg. My bad.
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Re: How Did You Do in 2017?

Post by fundy48 »

Using Globeinvestor it shows me as 11.1% plus about 1.8% dividends on a 70% equities, 15% cash, 15% FI.
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Re: How Did You Do in 2017?

Post by kumquat »

I can't be bothered don'tknow how to do the complex calculations. over the year, I spent, gave away or what ever about 12% of my NW as of Dec 31/16. My NW on Dec 31/17 was about 3% higher than the previous year.

Edit to add: NW is investments only, no residence, no nothing else.
I don't intend to offend anyone, that part is just a bonus.

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longinvest
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Re: How Did You Do in 2017?

Post by longinvest »

If anyone is interested, this online (and downloadable) calculator does all the hard work: Calculating personal returns

Here's an example of how to enter data:
data-entry.png
The spreadsheet can calculate returns across multiple accounts. Each month, the investor must to provide three pieces of data per account:
  • Total contributions. (Money added by the investor and his employer to the portfolio, excludes any internal cash flow such as dividend payments).
  • Total withdrawals. (Money removed by the investor from the portfolio, excludes any internal cash flow such as fees).
  • Portfolio balance at the close of the last day of the month.
The spreadsheet computes:
  • The investor return (money-weighted return, internal rate of return) for the entire investment period.
  • Portfolio returns (time-weighted returns, comparable returns) for 1 month, 3 months, 6 months, year-to-date (YTD), 1 year, 3 years, 5 years, and 10 years periods.
  • A growth of $10,000 chart.
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Re: How Did You Do in 2017?

Post by DenisD »

Here are my 2017 results. Basically, I've just edited last year's results and added this year's figures.

For 2017, my 1, 5, 10 and 15 year returns are 5%, 5.3%, 5.1% and 6.4%. The after-tax 15 year return is 0.4% less. My 1, 5 and 10 year returns for equities are 11.8%, 11.3% and 7.3%. At year-end, I had 34.3% equities and 50% cash. I think that's the most cash ever. I'll have to spend some of it in 2018.

My 2017 equity asset allocation target was unchanged at 40% Canada, 24% US, 24% EAFE, 12% Emerging Markets. The preliminary equity benchmark return is 14.6%. I underperformed my equity benchmark by 2.8%. Over the past 5 and 10 years, my equity returns are 1.6% lower and 0.9% higher than the benchmark returns.

In 2017, the equity markets returned to abnormal. All of the value ETFs I follow underperformed. Oil and gas had another losing year after rebounding last year. My Canadian small and large-cap stock screens did very well. My US large-cap screen managed to do a bit better than the benchmark. But my US small-cap screen lagged badly.

For those anal types like me who like to see all the details, I have Portfolio Returns, an Office Online spreadsheet. I've been tracking my investments on a homegrown Excel system since 2002.

Now for some comments on the individual asset classes.

For Canadian large-cap value, US large-cap value and US small-cap value, I have 20-stock screens based on O'Shaughnessy's algorithms. For Canadian small-cap value, I have a 10-stock screen.

The Canadian large-cap screen did 6.6% better than XIC. The Canadian small-cap screen continued to do well in its second year: 22% as opposed to 6.6% for XMD. After trailing for most of the year, the US large-cap screen did 0.7% better than the Vanguard large-cap ETF. The US small-cap screen continued its pattern of having alternating good and bad years. It lost 4.6%. The Vanguard small-cap ETF gained 8.6%.

Here are a couple of charts showing the history of my attempts to beat the index with stock screens. The charts show rolling 5 year returns for index funds and screens for Canadian and US markets.

During 1999 – 2000, I moved from a Canadian value mutual fund into a Dogs of the TSX screen. In the early 2000's, I held RBC O'Shaughnessy US large and small-cap currency hedged mutual funds. By the end of 2005, I'd replaced the small-cap fund with a screen. And I replaced the large-cap fund in 2006.

I started out with TD index funds. Replaced them with CIBC index funds. And then moved to iShares and Vanguard ETFs.

2017 CA.jpg
2017 US.jpg

Screen Trades, an Office Online spreadsheet, lists the trades for the screens since I started. Screen to Date, a Google spreadsheet, shows the price change for current positions.

I plan to show a comparison of my screens with fundamental and cap weighted ETFs in a week or two.

EAFE large-cap value is a mixture of Powershares and iShares fundamental index ETFs (PXF and CIE). I have Powershares fundamental index ETFs for EAFE small-cap value and emerging large-cap value (PDN and PXH). PXF/CIE underperformed VEA by 2.1% and PXH underperformed VWO by 5.5%.

I have iShares S&P/TSX Composite ETF for Canadian all-cap (XIC). And I have Vanguard ETFs for US large-cap, EAFE large-cap and emerging large-cap (VV, VEA, VWO).

For REITs, I have the top 8 REITs by market cap, excepting hotels and retirement residences. They gained 6.5%.

For resources, I have some small and mid-cap dividend paying resource companies, mainly energy companies. They lost 12.7%.

For bonds, I have Vanguard Canadian Aggregate Bond Index ETF (VAB). It gained 2.2%.

For real return bonds, I just have a 2021 bond. It gained 0.2%. The 2031 real return bond gained 0.7%.

Cash is a mixture of a GIC ladder and various high interest accounts. Cash gained 1.4%.
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Re: How Did You Do in 2017?

Post by AltaRed »

ig17 wrote: 31 Dec 2017 14:52 I use Quicken to record all financial transactions but keep a separate XIRR spreadsheet to calculate portfolio performance. Quicken performance report is a black box and, for the life of me, I can't make sense of the number it spits out. Quicken number doesn't match my back-of-the-envelope sanity check.not available due to poor record-keeping in the years prior to Quicken adoption.
I don't quite get the numbers from Quicken either. I think how forex is handled is not correct*, but given I would never open a spreadsheet, never mind populate one, I will accept its results over the long term (multiple year approach, if not a single year). Hence why I post both adjusted and un-adjusted.

* My hunch about what Quicken does is to stick religiously to 'transaction exchange rate' for every single transaction and does NOT value non-CAD holdings at the actual forex rate at the beginning of each period, e.g. 1/1/2017 for this calendar year. The reason why I believe that is that the Net Worth values of each month varies with forex rate, even on a historical basis, as well as the current month. Example: My Net Worth on 1/1/2017 in CAD equivalent should never change for January 2017 no matter what happens to the loonie the rest of the year. But it does because it 'adjusts' my January 2017 net worth to reflect today's forex rate. That is fundamentally wrong and can (should) overstate, or understate returns in any given year depending on which direction the loonie moves...provided they use the same logic in return calculations. Over a very long time, all that will cancel out.

I think Bylo at one time tried to get Intuit to change it when he was, I believe, a beta tester, but was ignored. Perhaps new ownership might reconsider but I doubt American owners give diddly squat about what mostly is a Canuck problem. And further, since I also give diddly squat about spreadsheets, I don't feel like swimming upstream to pursue it.
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Re: How Did You Do in 2017?

Post by IdOp »

For 2017, my overall portfolio IRR was about 10.7 % (without Dec 29 HISA/MMF distributions).

5-year IRR is 11.2 %

10-year IRR is 6.4 %

15-year IRR is 7.5 %

For context the 2017 closing allocation was:

Code: Select all

  Cdn Cash  :    8.0 %
  US  Cash  :    4.9 %
  Cdn Bond  :    9.1 %
  Preferred :    2.9 %
  Cdn Eq Fnd:   16.2 %
  Cdn Stocks:   14.0 %
  US  Eq Fnd:   27.0 %
  Int Eq Fnd:   17.7 %

        Cash           :   13.0 %
        Fixed Income   :   12.0 %
        Canadian Equity:   30.3 %
        US Equity      :   27.0 %
        Intern'l Equity:   17.7 %
A poster up-thread asked about the FPX Growth/Balanced/Income benchmarks. It seems FP's data is currently borked, and we'll have to derive things from the Croft Group CSV file, which hopefully will be updated to the end of December sometime next week.

Some of us hold part or all of our Canadian equity in individual stocks. A benchmark for this segment is the S&P/TSX Composite Total Return Index, which I'm estimating returned 9.05 % for 2017.

Judging from VAB, Canadian bonds were up a little over 2 %. Using VEA, and VTI, as a guide International, and US, stocks were up roughly 18 %, and 13 %, respectively, in C$ terms.

Overall a nice result, I'd take it again for next year. I think I wrote that last year too. :)
Last edited by IdOp on 31 Dec 2017 23:08, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: How Did You Do in 2017?

Post by deaddog »

My benchmark for the year was a portfolio of 4 ETFs. This portfolio was started on July 29th 2016 (I put some money with a financial advisor on that date). Portfolio was equal positions in ZDJ, VCE', VFV and XQQ. Return this year 20.1%

The financial advisor did 13.6% (I insisted on 100% equities)

A more conservative 3 ETF portfolio with equal positions in ZAG, VCN,and XAW returned 8.3%

My personal performance was 26.5%
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Re: How Did You Do in 2017?

Post by kumquat »

deaddog wrote: 31 Dec 2017 21:41
The financial advisor did 13.6% (I insisted on 100% equities)

That's a very generous of you. Most people consider .5% of AUM to be too high.
I don't intend to offend anyone, that part is just a bonus.

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Re: How Did You Do in 2017?

Post by peter »

12.5% for 2017, 12.4% for 5 years, 11.7% for 8 years, all calculated with Excel XIRR. 15% REIT, 27.5% Canada, 27.5% US, 22.5% EAFE, 7.5% emerging. Seven years prior to 2017 I had 20% REIT, 25% Canada, 25% US, 22.5% EAFE, 7.5% emerging. I've pretty much always been very close to those targets in practice.

I don't have older data in the same format (and got hit as expected in 2008/2009), but, looking back, all stock investments 15 to 8 years ago turned out to be almost noise in the grander scheme.
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Re: How Did You Do in 2017?

Post by SQRT »

IRR 1year. 14.3%
3year. 12.4%
5 year. 15.7%
10 year. 10.4%.

100% Canadian div payers. Heavy on banks. What was the TSX total1 year return? I think around 9.1%. Looking forward to seeing the 10 year numbers next year. Should be around 14%.

Edit: Somebody up thread confirmed TSX return.
Last edited by SQRT on 01 Jan 2018 09:54, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: How Did You Do in 2017?

Post by Peculiar_Investor »

According to the Financial Times, S&P/TSX COMPOSITE TOTAL RETURN INDEX, TR0000:TOR Summary - FT.com it was 8.14% in 2017.

Added: Over the next days/weeks I would expect Norbert and NormR to publish data so that Norm's Stingy Investor: Periodic Table of Annual Returns for Canadians provides 2017 data.
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Re: How Did You Do in 2017?

Post by IdOp »

I suspect very strongly the FT value is 29 Dec 2016 to 29 Dec 2017. So it
is including 30 Dec 2016 movement, which shouldn't be part of the 2017
return. Using the FT value of 54,002.68 for 29 Dec 2017 I get the exact
2017 return to be 9.095 %.
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Re: How Did You Do in 2017?

Post by Peculiar_Investor »

IdOp wrote: 01 Jan 2018 11:08 Using the FT value of 54,002.68 for 29 Dec 2017 I get the exact 2017 return to be 9.095 %.
Thanks for the correction/clarification. That's why I leave the heavy lifting to Norbert and NormR :wink:
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