Last quarter, almost all of my investments were experiencing positive performance. Three months can make a big difference. My investments tell a different story today.
One thing has not changed since last quarter: my company stock continues to do well, even when the broader stock market is in decline. This was not my best performing investment over the first half of the year, however. That acknowledgment belongs to a small investment I made several years ago in Akamai (AKAM) with free money earned from a bonus for opening an account with ShareBuilder. Overall, while the stock has seen good performance for the year, it has eked out only a $3 profit since the time I opened the investment.
Here are my investment account balances and performance numbers as of the end of March 2010. If you have any questions or suggestions, feel free to leave them in the comments.
Published or updated July 10, 2010. If you enjoyed this article, subscribe to the RSS feed or receive daily emails. Follow @flexo on Twitter and visit our Facebook page for more updates.
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Luke Landes founded Consumerism Commentary in 2003 and has been building online communities since 1990. Luke, also known as Flexo, has contributed to PC World Magazine, US News, Forbes, and other publications. 
{ 4 comments… read them below or add one }
Looks like you should throw away your retirement portfolio and do all the investing yourself with a 15% outperformance differential between the both!
It woulda been great to sink the $122K into Akami!
It does seem that way now.
I know your overall balances are down right now along with the overall market but I’m wondering for your retirement funds how many more units (shares) your allocations bought during this period.
It’s important to remember the system you are using. Like when you allocate an amount and when the market is down your allocation buys more units (shares). Was that part of the plan for your retirement fund?
For the non-retirement funds, did you add to it or/and did you remove (sell) funds from those investments?
I invest a constant percentage of my income into the 401(k), enough to max out the 401(k) for the year. So every two weeks, that’s a constant dollar amount (except for when I receive raises, etc.). When the share prices are lower, I’m buying more shares of the investments. I’m only buying into a few of the funds listed under the 401(k), so the rest don’t see any inflows or outflows.
I haven’t sold any shares in the non-retirement investments. I might have improved my performance by using some of the money market funds in my Roth IRA to buy into VTSMX when the price was at its lowest, but I don’t think I even looked at that option during the past few months. It’s something I should pay attention to and maybe I can pick another entrance point some time before the end of the year.