Its time of the year to ponder on the year bygone and look to the future. In that spirit, in this article, I will dig into my actively managed portfolio of investments and summarize my performance for the year.

I will begin with the following chart that compares my performance for the year to those of SPY, an S&P500 index fund.

Following are some observations on how my portfolio has evolved over the year:

• I ended the year in the negative territory, with annualized gains of -3.18 %, which was marginally better than those for SPY, with gains of -4.55 % for the year
• It was quite a volatile year for my portfolio, with several high highs and low lows for the year. In particular, the 3 phases marked above, involved periods when my portfolio diverged quite a bit from the benchmark S&P500 index fund.
  • Phase 1: This was a period when I was forced to liquidate some of my assets at a loss, to fund a home purchase. The timing of the sale was unfortunate, as it pretty much coincided with a short-term drop in the markets.
  • Phase 2: This phase corresponded to a very significant recovery in CMG stocks and my timely exit from the position. I am particularly proud of this exit, given my conviction for recovery in CMG stock price going into 2018
  • Phase 3: This phase corresponded to a time period when all my bets seemed to have played on well, in particular, rebound in the price of LB, NWL, FIT, VTR and CVS from their lows.  For the first time in the year, I felt that my strategy of contrarian value was playing out well, so much so that at peak, I was about 8 % better than SPY returns for the year.

Phase 3 however did not last long and all my gains for the year fizzled out with the market rout that followed in the last month of the year.

The following figure shows the evolution of net-asset-value (NAV) for my actively managed portfolio as well as the differential on stocks that traded in and out of my portfolio over the year.

Some highlights are:

• NAV of my actively managed portfolio  significantly increased towards the end of the year. This was primarily driven by  purchasing spree that I went on as the market went on sale in December.
• For a brief period in mid-April, my NAV went below what I started with for the year, resulting from a significant draw down on assets to fund the purchase of my house.
• I purchased far more stocks than sold for the year, several of these purchases happened towards the end of the year. Following is the summary of my activities for the year:
  
  • I completely exited out of CMG, QCOM, CALM and ESRX.
  • I did not add to or sell any of the stocks in DIS  and DISCA.
  • I  made significant addition to my positions in FIT and CRTO with relatively minor addition to positions in WFC, CVS
  • NWL, LB, OAK, UPS, FB, GS, AAPL, EGO, CMCSA, MMP, ENB, VTR were new additions to my portfolio.

Courtesy of Personal Capital, below is sector allocation chart for my portfolio. Financial Services and Tech stocks form the bulk of my investments, followed by investment in consumer cyclicals.

Financial services should benefit from rising interest rates in the coming year. Tech was a difficult proposition for investment for majority of 2018. However, with the beating that FAANGS have taken in December, there were some bargains to be had and I loaded them up. 

To conclude, below is snapshot of my portfolio standings at the end of 2018.