Yearly Recap (December 2019)

Yearly Recap (December 2019)

There it is.

An end to a great year and eagerness to make the next one even better.

But hey, this is both a monthly update and an end of year post. So first thing first – as a personal finance / FIRE blog owner, I have the obligation to report my portfolio performance. 🙂

So let’s start with the biggest winners.

Stock portfolio 📈

As majority of my wealth is allocated in the stock market, I rode the 20+% 1Y increase in the S&P 500.

While at it, I have to point out that generating a 5 digit return in an almost-completely-passive manner is something I wouldn’t have thought possible a couple of years ago.

Fully aware that the year was a good one as well. 2018 finished slightly in the red and 2019’s performance is largely due to the “low” starting point. Low is in quotes because it didn’t seem low back then. Many people (and the media) thought it’s a beginning of a bear market and potentially a recession, and were almost right.

Here’s my post from December 2018. See the ease with which I took it. That’s the mindset of a real long-term investor.

And here’s the post on Recession Forecasts and the Media.

Good reads. 🙂

And lastly, some charts! The monthly:

And the yearly:

ATHs all year! 🙂

By the way, nobody knows how the market will perform on the short run.

That being said, what do I think the near term future will bring?

I don’t know… But I keep ~30% of my wealth in cash.

Cryptocurrency 😈

My stock portfolio performance was also supplemented by the gains in the cryptocurrency market. It’s almost 50% lower than the peak in July, but still finishing the year deep in the green.

My hands are also bloody from the falling knife I was trying to catch the last two months. Interpret this however you see fit, but remember that no rewards are gained without accepting an appropriate level of risk.

Still excited for the supply shock after the BTC block reward halving in May 2020. And still standing on my forecast I shared in How I Invest, expecting a beginning of a new bull run in the second half of the next year.

Let me know if you’d be interested to see more crypto related material on this blog. I’m keeping it brief and shallow for now as most of my readers (mostly a segment of the FIRE community) are more into personal finance and traditional investments.

MonkWealth is here for you, people. Notepad works well enough for sharing thoughts with myself. 🙂

Okay, charts!

Monthly (December 2019):

And yearly:

I’m entitled to becoming a millionaire in Q4 2020.

Note: my stock portfolio doesn’t contain only S&P tracking ETFs nor my cryptocurrency allocation is fully invested in Bitcoin. Still, their charts are representative to my respective portfolios’ performances.

MonkWealth

Talking about the blog itself, I have big plans for it during 2020. Expect updates and changes.

A redesign is something I’m considering and started making plans for. I have an idea of modifying the website quite a bit, but I’m still struggling with a prerequisite – the most important thing:

I want to narrow the context and define my tone of voice.

MonkWealth is becoming more mature, there’s no doubt about it. I don’t feel like I’m going in circles here.

However, what I do feel is that I’m going into many directions at once.

So, I might revisit the “Mind, Body, and Personal Finance” slogan and go with something along the lines of “Sustainable Wealth Accumulation” (but better :)).

What I’m trying to say is that I’ll try to steer it more towards investing and finance topics with an occasional personal finance touch. That doesn’t seem much more different than what I’m doing now, of course. What I’m referring to is the fact that while I was publishing the investing posts consistently, the blog experienced the fastest growth. In other words, statistically, it added most value to the community. That’s what MonkWealth is all about.

As usual, nothing I’m saying here is written in stone and I’ll reevaluate quarterly. I still have some unfinished posts that await publishing, so the transition will be quite smooth and potentially lengthy. Some might not even notice it. 🙂