2021 Returns Thread

[thepupil]

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2017:

 

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Taxable 1:    12.5%, (11.2% annualized since 5/2013), this account runs hedged to a max 20% drawdown (via lots of puts), used to short, and owns puts that hedge taxable 2 so it's a little skewed downward but no excuses lol)

 

Taxable 2:    Whatever unhedged Berkshire did, more or less, no long term performance data, recently opened Fido account

 

IRA:            18.5%  (22.5% annualized since 10/2013), concentrated long only

 

IRA 2            ~16%, Fido account rolled over last year so no long term performance was a 401k in stable value previously

 

Roth IRA:    16.8%  (17.8% annualized since 10/2013), concentrated long only

 

 

Spent a lot on hedges and margin interest in my taxable (which is fine because that's the plan, I invest 100% of my paycheck in my taxable and borrow from it to fund living expenditures, basically I buy 100% of my takehome in hedged Berkshire. The IRA's underperformed but they are very lumpy and I'm okay with that.

 

Worst decision was getting rid of ~200 bps of BTC in 2016 "cleaning up portfolio".

 

2018: 

 

All Interactive Brokers accounts (this is Taxable 1, IRA 1, and Roth consolidated into one performance because I'm lazy now):

 

1 yr: -2.41% with S&P and ACWI at -4.3% and -9.4%

3 yr: +14.9% / annum with S&P and ACWI at +9.3% and +6.6%

5 yr: +10.2% / annum with S&P and ACWI at +8.5% and +4.3%

 

Outperformance to S&P for consolidated IBKR accounts. I am US based and heavily biased to the US and real estate/financials. 

1 yr: +1.9%

3 yr: +5.6%

5 yr: +1.7%

 

Oddly, this year (a down year) my best performing account was the taxable account that is levered long (on a cash basis) and pays a fair bit of margin interest but is hedged with puts to a max drawdown. That account was up 4.4%. The 100% long and unhedged accounts were down between 6 and 8%.

 

Thus far in my investing career, I don't know if I've added much value against the indices in terms of risk adjusted returns. 1/2 of my assets are in non-taxable accounts which makes me less concerned about adding value after taxes. I think my portfolio is less fundamentally risky than the indices but we will only know over time. I know that from 2011-2013 (before opening IBKR accounts) I outperformed by about 20% cumulatively, so this would improve the since inceptions a bit, maybe to like 3-4% outperformance / year.

 

My Fidelity accounts don't seem to have a readily available performance calculator. I'll have to look into this. IBKR is over 2/3 of assets. 

 

My work 401K (~8% of asset) was all in stable value then all in REIT index as of February/March (which was a profitable trade) then all in EM Index (which has given a little bit of performance back). The sum of that was a +5% return from index/market timing. 

 

2019

 

Consolidated IBKR account: 22.6%. Got rid of my Fido taxable and rolled that back into IBKR, have another IRA that's all in TGONF (12% or so return) and a work 401K that's completely in Vanguard Emerging Markets, which returned about 18%, so my overall investments did slightly worse than IBKR accounts. 

 

I'd regard this to be a pretty terrible relative result that will more or less wipe away a few years of S&P 500 outperformance. Reasons for underperformance are easy to spot; my biggest positions lagged the market in a big way. 

 

My largest positions (on a notional basis) are hedged Berkshire, hedged VNO, Tetragon Financial, none of which did all that great, all of which I'm excited about continuing to hold.  

 

Over the past 6.5 years, consolidated IBKR accounts is about 13.3% / year (literally right on top of the S&P 500), which includes a taxable account at 11.5%/year, an IRA at about 14.8% / year and a another IRA at 17.1% / year. 

 

The IRA's have always been super concentrated. The taxable started out long/short and ended up with me just using hedges and call options to limit drawdown rather than shorting.

 

2020

 

My IBKR consolidated accounts show a return of -4%. These comprise about 60% of assets.

 

My ~35% in fidelity accounts performed better, as did the 5% in my wife's Roth IRA which was in VTSAX (ha!). It's difficult to tell their actual performance because of inflows due to rollovers. If I add up all the dollar profits from non IB accounts its about 4% of my ending NW and 2x the IBKR $ losses, so I think overall return is bout 2%

 

My NW grew about 30% from savings, mortgage amortization, and home price appreciation, which is a consolation prize in a humbling year. Here's to being very levered long SFH and having a good year professionally! (though 10% HPA is not sustainable and will reverse at some point)

 

I endured a ~40%+ drawdown in the beginning of the year as I went into this very poorly positioned with heavy financials and office exposure. Several of my holdings have not recovered though in my opinion value grew (Berkshire/Tetragon); while others have endured permanent impairment (office). While I recovered, I think that initial drawdown did impact my overall ability to recover more strongly. I'm a bit more timid these days.

 

My biggest mistakes were in portfolio management. I manage my parents/sister's money and they each outperformed their net exposure (albeit slightly) w/ far lower weighting to tech stocks than the broader market. My own portfolio suffered from undue concentration and premature doubling down in the initial February / March timeline and theirs did not as I run theirs with a greater diversity of idea types and w/ a greater tilt toward business quality.

 

I can handle missing out on the triple digit gains of the most growthy/tech-y crowd (I know how I'm wired and why I'll never be good at that), but there's no way around it: I completely failed to take advantage of what was one of the better opportunity sets of my short investing career.

 

May write more detailed analysis of what went wrong at another time.

 

 

2021:

I made about 55% on a consolidated basis. Have precise data for interactive brokers (+68%) and Fidelity looks like (+22%). NW increased by about 60% marking house to market, but I arbitrarily wrote down the residence to cost to stay hungry, so only went up 30%. 

 

Lots went right. Little went wrong. I started the thread to obnoxiously tout my own returns. Now others may do so and one-up me (particularly on a long term basis)

 

My LT results are very market like with more vol and higher tax drag

Edited January 1, 2022 by thepupil

[JRM]

2021: 16%

2013-2021: 23% per annum

 

Doesn't feel great when the S&P is up so much and I see many people posting monster returns this year.  Oh well.  

 

Didn't trade many core positions last year, so we'll see if they work this year.

[NewbieD]

2012-2020: 44%/yr

2021: 31%

 

Made a ton of mistakes. Primarily owning too much profitless-businesses. But happy that I continued to fight and stay engaged. My portfolio has much more cash-flow heavy companies now than 6 months ago. 

[aws]

My regular taxable accounts had basically market matching returns of low 30% range.

 

My Roth IRA return ended up on the moon thanks to crazy gambles on meme stocks and options. It was somewhat of a gambling vehicle for me in the past, but now I'll have to take it seriously since it's now the largest component of my net worth. I'm almost embarrassed to post the number so I'll just post the screenshot, which you can also see some of the horrific results in prior years to dispell any notions that I'm secretly a genius trader. I don't deserve the return and probably shouldn't have done what it took to get there, but now I'll just have to avoid squandering the money.

[ValueMaven]

2,000% ??  How …

 

even still you might be flattish with that drawdown lol

[KJP]

Pre-tax, in USD:

 

2021:  11%

 

Biggest winner:  Leatt Corp.

Biggest loser:  Altice USA

 

Historical

2020: 14%

2019: 31%

2018: 11%

2017: 10%

2016: 22%

[thepupil]

1 hour ago, aws said:

My regular taxable accounts had basically market matching returns of low 30% range.

 

My Roth IRA return ended up on the moon thanks to crazy gambles on meme stocks and options. It was somewhat of a gambling vehicle for me in the past, but now I'll have to take it seriously since it's now the largest component of my net worth. I'm almost embarrassed to post the number so I'll just post the screenshot, which you can also see some of the horrific results in prior years to dispell any notions that I'm secretly a genius trader. I don't deserve the return and probably shouldn't have done what it took to get there, but now I'll just have to avoid squandering the money.

Amazing! Congrats 

[cwericb]

Nothing spectacular, but with a gain of 33.88% I am quite satisfied. I had three oil stocks that produced 400-500%. Unfortunately they were very small holdings. SNC, a relatively recent addition was my only loser of 17 stocks and I hold out high hopes for it

Edited January 2, 2022 by cwericb

[no_free_lunch]

I am up a mere 20%.  Crazy return but I see it as a failure given the markets performance.  I am about 50% USA and 50% international.  Generally had 20-25% bonds or cash during the year which was a huge anchor.

Edited January 2, 2022 by no_free_lunch

[Xerxes]

I did calculation in about 40 min or so, hopefully no mistakes.

Not exactly market beating against S&P500 .. but I suppose there is no price for all the stuff that I am learning.

 

----------------

TFSA = 11%  (i.e. most speculative positions are located here, which deflated in Q4)

RRSP = 23%

 

TFSA/RRSP Combined = 20% (i.e. RRSP is much larger than TFSA, so it pulled up the average)

 

Crypto = 46% (i.e. due to Ethereum mostly)

 

TFSA/RRSP Combined + Crypto = 22%  (i.e. small 200 basis lift as Crypto is a small allocation)

 

[muscleman]

Up about 18% in the stocks account. Up about 60% regarding my real estate down payments. I've been aggressively moving money out of stock account to buy real estate since Biden got elected as I believe we are getting a repeat of the 1970s when the stock market would go flat and real estate would go through the roof, so I wanted to go all in on real estate but did not find that many bargains.

I don't have any stocks right now and I maintain the view of the repeat of a dot com bubble top. When it crashes, I think even more money will flow to RE.

Moving forward I expect housing market in the US to go up by 20% a year for the next 3 years. If this happens, my real estate down payments would go up by 80% a year for the next 3 years while collecting a small amount of cash flow.

[backtothebeach]

2021 was the year when the stars finally aligned for my leveraged Berkshire and compounder heavy, only partially hedged portfolio. Almost everything that could go right, went right.

 

2014-2020: 10.2% CAGR

2021: 97.5%

 

Biggest contributors: Berkshire, BAM, MKL, CLF, GME short puts.

Biggest losers: short SPY (hedge), short AAPL calls (hedge)

 

8 year CAGR is now 18.6%.

 

 

[SharperDingaan]

Consolidated equity > 100%. Capital for repatriation > 65%. It has been a great year and should be the start of a consecutive string of them over the next 4-5 years. Key assumption being an annual material capital carve-out to remove excess capital.

 

Wins across all our o/g stocks, crypto, etc. ; even on our capital carve-outs (FFH). Losses &/or overpayments on the equity positions being built for years 3-5 (as expected). Minimal reduction in share quantities, ensuring maximum dividends going forward.

 

We were lucky, but a lot of it was strategic planning and expertise as well. Continuous carve-outs to keep reducing risk and keep us within our circle of competence. Seasonal roundtrips as opportunity presents. Crypto trading off of ongoing technical developments, via ETF’s.   

 

Over time, accumulating capital carve-outs will fund capital repatriation as an annual dividend; the corpus essentially being a private version of Norway’s Sovereign Wealth Fund. When we inevitably bust as commodity investors, our gains over the cycle will live on.

 

As the bumper sticker says …  “Please God, give me one more oil boom. I promise not to piss it all away next time.”

 

SD

[RiskAdjReturn]

34 minutes ago, muscleman said:

Up about 18% in the stocks account. Up about 60% regarding my real estate down payments. I've been aggressively moving money out of stock account to buy real estate since Biden got elected as I believe we are getting a repeat of the 1970s when the stock market would go flat and real estate would go through the roof, so I wanted to go all in on real estate but did not find that many bargains.

I don't have any stocks right now and I maintain the view of the repeat of a dot com bubble top. When it crashes, I think even more money will flow to RE.

Moving forward I expect housing market in the US to go up by 20% a year for the next 3 years. If this happens, my real estate down payments would go up by 80% a year for the next 3 years while collecting a small amount of cash flow.

when you analyze the real estate investments in terms of "down payments" (ie the equity "check"), is the financing non-recourse or recourse? on recourse financing, such as one's personal resi, really best to think of in terms of total value (not the home equity). if you are making bets with non-recourse financing, that's fantastic and kudos to you

[Spekulatius]

18 hours ago, aws said:

My regular taxable accounts had basically market matching returns of low 30% range.

 

My Roth IRA return ended up on the moon thanks to crazy gambles on meme stocks and options. It was somewhat of a gambling vehicle for me in the past, but now I'll have to take it seriously since it's now the largest component of my net worth. I'm almost embarrassed to post the number so I'll just post the screenshot, which you can also see some of the horrific results in prior years to dispell any notions that I'm secretly a genius trader. I don't deserve the return and probably shouldn't have done what it took to get there, but now I'll just have to avoid squandering the money.

Congrats. What a ride.

 

[muscleman]

1 hour ago, RiskAdjReturn said:

when you analyze the real estate investments in terms of "down payments" (ie the equity "check"), is the financing non-recourse or recourse? on recourse financing, such as one's personal resi, really best to think of in terms of total value (not the home equity). if you are making bets with non-recourse financing, that's fantastic and kudos to you

non-recourse.

 

A broker just told me that a very large Canadian pension fund is aggressively buying all kinds of real estate in the US that they can touch.  He just sold them a piece of 4 acre land for 1.7M and they plan to build a self storage on it.

 

I think after all the central banks printed like hell in the last 18 months, and with interest rate still insanely low, we will see a massive price hike in real assets. The stock market will repeat the 2000 top and when it crashes, there will be even more money competing for a return in the real assets.

Edited January 2, 2022 by muscleman

[KJP]

2 hours ago, muscleman said:

I don't have any stocks right now and I maintain the view of the repeat of a dot com bubble top. When it crashes, I think even more money will flow to RE.

Moving forward I expect housing market in the US to go up by 20% a year for the next 3 years. If this happens, my real estate down payments would go up by 80% a year for the next 3 years while collecting a small amount of cash flow.

 

That would be quite a run.  What is your view on the trajectory of (i) rent/cap rates on these assets, (ii) real estate financing rates over the same three-year time period, and (iii) wages?

 

I assume your view is that rates stay where they are and cap rates continue to compress.  If they did not, would there be sufficient wage growth to pay for the implied rise in rents?

[muscleman]

3 minutes ago, KJP said:

 

That would be quite a run.  What is your view on the trajectory of (i) rent/cap rates on these assets, (ii) real estate financing rates over the same three-year time period, and (iii) wages?

 

I assume your view is that rates stay where they are and cap rates continue to compress.  If they did not, would there be sufficient wage growth to pay for the implied rise in rents?

 

Looking at historical caps from 2009-now, cap rates have been steadily decreasing. In the Seattle area, 4-4.5% cap is the new norm. It makes no sense to me because banks are lending at 4%, so there is really no room for cash flow. But yikes.... Those big Canadian pension funds are coming here because cap rates are 2% in Toronto, and in their eyes, it is so freaking cheap here.

 

Regarding mortgage rates.. If you check history, every time QE stopped, rates DECLINED. This is counter intuitive but every time QE ends, the stock market crashes, and traders fly to safety and bought bonds. So my view is not rates staying where they are, but rates stay or go lower.

 

Right now my base case is the repeat of the 1970s. Check rates and housing prices going from 1976-1980. Rate went from 6% to 13% while housing price doubled. I think that will repeat this time. My bull case is declining rate and even bigger price hikes. 

 

 

[Viking]

My traditional investment portfolio returned 60% (59.8%) for my 2nd best year in % terms and best year (by far) in total $. Average return the past 5 years is spot on 20%. Average return for the 4 years from 2017-2020 was 10%. So 2021 was a big outlier. 

 

Best year in % terms was 2003 at +87%.

Third best year in % terms was 2007 at +47%.

 

How are returns in 2021, 2007 & 2003 related? Fairfax was the driver all three times. Crazy. So for me Fairfax has been the gift that keeps on giving over the decades (guess I am getting old...). I backed up the truck with Fairfax in Nov of last year and the run up in shares to March/April was amazing. Steel (mostly Stelco), lumber (IFP, WFG and RFP at different times), oil (Suncor), Fairfax India and Atlas also contributed. Fairfax announcing the Dutch auction was an unexpected gift to end the year (spiking Fairfax 20% to finish the year). 

 

From March right through to year-end I was able to take advantage of the volatility in FFH and pretty much everything else. A great recent example was Resolute. Mid Nov lumber future started spiking because of the flooding in BC. Lumber futures kept going up right into year end. RFP stock was slow to respond. So I bought some early in Dec and sold Friday for a 25% gain. I rolled the proceeds into Cenovus. I was a trader in 2022. Lucky. Opportunistic. But I will take it.

 

But the big reason for my outperformance was concentration. There are times when an opportunity gets very asymmetrical: low downside risk and big upside potential. That was Fairfax in Nov of 2020. That was also Fairfax in 2007; we all KNEW the CDS gains were coming... The Dutch auction announced in Nov 2021 was another asymmetrical 'bet' (for those holding shares in tax free accounts), although it had a lower (capped at US$500) return.

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I also sold my house with the proceeds arriving in July. That new part of my portfolio returned 9%. Solid 6 month return.

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This year I tracked 'traditional investment portfolio' and 'house proceeds' separately. Starting 2022 it will all be one bucket.

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At the start of each year my goal is to earn 6-8%. No pressure. Keep is simple. And then be opportunistic as the year unfolds. Every year Mr. Market offers up some great opportunities. And posters on this board are great at pointing them out... Patience is key. Another is being inquisitive and open minded (love Druckenmiller) - and also pulling the trigger when the stars align ( @Gregmal is my Jiminy Cricket here).    

Edited January 2, 2022 by Viking

[longlake95]

Whoa Viking, well done!

 

+34.8%, mostly from the 4 horseman: BRK, TFII, SNC and BERY. And what maybe the new 5th horseman… HTL. 

 

 

Edited January 2, 2022 by longlake95

[SharperDingaan]

Viking, great job!

We also both owe a big thanks to Dazel for highlighting the 2021 FFH opportunity, when nobody wanted to hear it.

We were in FFH  as a safe place to park repatriation capital - just wasn't expecting to make double digits on it!

 

SD

 

[compoundvalue]

~+39% (adjusted for some inflows and outflows across accounts). Some winners: WFC / WFC LEAPS, OXY warrants. Losers: WIX (significantly increased position around current levels). 
 

Historical

2021: ~+39%
2020:~-5%
2019*: N/A

2018*: N/A
2017: +42.1%
2016: ~+26%
 

* Had a job that wouldn’t allow me trade during 2018-2019

 

[Viking]

56 minutes ago, SharperDingaan said:

Viking, great job!

We also both owe a big thanks to Dazel for highlighting the 2021 FFH opportunity, when nobody wanted to hear it.

We were in FFH  as a safe place to park repatriation capital - just wasn't expecting to make double digits on it!

 

SD

 

agreed. I also remember Sanjeev banging the table very loudly on Fairfax. 

[flesh]

24% taxable, 36% non taxable, roughly equal account balances. Only about 70% invested throughout the year in non taxable and 50% in taxable on average so roic was higher. 

 

Last year was 70% ish, before that I'm not sure but I know before I moved all my accounts it was outpacing s and p 500 by 8% a year going back to 13'

 

I didn't really do anything. Probably spent 5hrs/month. Mostly brk and a lil frfhf. Sold out of brk around 270 and then continued to sell puts on brk for the remainder of year. I think I got lazy after 2021. Can't escape the new paradigm everything is expensiveish feeling.

 

[hasilp89]

Did well this year but don’t feel I have enough years behind me to post it or feel it means much or is not just luck. Ton of respect to the folks above who have done well consistently over the years. I hope to get there. Many thanks to the folks who post great ideas and insight, gtx, stelco, dpz were all large contributors for me and I found a lot of help here on those names. Also a shout out to bill hwang for pumping disck, will accept the luck on that one.