Performance

I've been monitoring roughly how my portfolio has been doing for a few years, but as the amount of money I've got has become more meaningful I've decided to try and track it more accurately, properly accounting for dividends etc. starting from the beginning of 2012.  Choosing a benchmark is always difficult but I've opted for the FTSE 100, for ease of measurement more than anything else.

My goal is to outperform by 5%+ a year.  The FTSE is a relatively unvolatile index compared to most country indices and AIM shares (of which I own a lot) generally move in and out of favour in dramatic fashion.  As such I expect to underperform markedly when markets fall, but hopefully outperform by a greater amount when they rise.

I've umm'ed and err'ed on whether to include cash in my return figures.  I generally view holding cash as an investment decision rather than being constrained by liquidity requirements for daily living, so really it should be included in my results.  The argument in favour of leaving it out is that I'd probably have to hold cash anyway if I was invested in an index fund.  I think the arguments in favour are stronger, so I'll be including the cash weighting in my performance figures.

Anyway, here's the performance through to the end of February.  As you can see, I've had a reasonably nice run, helped by an immediate gain of 20% on my United Carpets position.  Game Group has all but gone into administration but I've already felt the pain from that one.  But then again, markets have generally risen since the start of the year so perhaps all I've got is some leveraged beta...