It is time, yet again, for the monthly airing of my private financial laundry. June was all about rally mode!
All of the prior updates in this series are available on the Savings Diary page. The first, I’m Just Saving…Personal Finance Diary kind of provides the “origins story.”
In Our Last Episode
In our prior May update, despite my hard work my “stash” declined to $201,000. This was largely due to market fluctuations, because the S&P 500 was down about 6.4% in May.
Current Portfolio
I remain “overweight” foreign stocks. See Media Pin of the Week – More GMO, Weekly Media Pin – Grantham on Graham, Best Foreign Value Factor ETFs, Resource Roundup: More CAPE, and Foreign Value Factor ETFs Update.
Overall, about 50% of my overall portfolio is allocated to non-U.S. domiciled stocks. (I suppose that is only a relative overweight). I also manage a bit of my portfolio based on a little systematic, trend strategy. I’e also got about 20% allocated to bonds. Excluding the “trend allocation,” I’m only actively stock picking (including value tilt and other factor allocations) in about 10% of my portfolio.
I need to do some update posts on COTY and CAG. Basically, I still like CAG and am not going to panic out of COTY when the insiders just completed a huge tender at a price where the stock is currently trading. They did essentially cut the dividend a few months back with the in-kind election program but that seems a prudent move. Both are good examples of the perils of merger and acquisition activity, but I don’t think that’s a surprise to anyone paying attention.
This Month
Nothing unusual happened on the income and spending fronts. I just continued with my automated baseline savings of about $3,000. The market, however, roared back from the sell-off in May. The S&P 500 was up 7.1%. Emerging markets and EAFE stocks were up 6.2% and 5.9%, respectively. Even the AGG index of investment grade bonds was up 1.3%. It looks like I was up about 6%, ending the month at $214,000.
Onward
In summary….congratulations everybody, we are all bull market geniuses! [Especially you bitcoin speculators…]
More seriously, it is pretty encouraging to see that a good month in the market basically added ~$10K to my savings pile, outstripping the additions I was able to make by the “sweat of my brow” (by a pretty wide margin). I will have to try and savor this memory when we are in the next 50% drawdown.