Year-to-Date Quarter 1, Report, 2019 Steve’s Portfolio
On March 29, 2019, at the end of the last stock and bond market trading day for the first quarter, the financial news media reported: “Dow Rallies More Than 200 Points As S&P 500 Logs Its Best Quarterly Advance Since 2009!”
What a quarter! Remember Q4 2018 when the markets were near bear territory? The stock and bond markets shot right back up in the first three months of this new year. My portfolio passively follows along like a baby duck clinging to mother duck. Wherever the mother duck walks the ducklings follow. Same with my portfolio.
If you have been following my quarter and annual portfolio reports over the years, you know how my portfolio works. When the market goes up, my portfolio goes up, and when the market goes down so does my portfolio. I designed and constructed my portfolio carefully to mitigate risk across core asset classes so it provides a reasonable, predicable and a decent return. And it worked! Since the disastrous 2008 financial crisis, the markets have increased or been neutral every year except last year. In 2018, my portfolio declined by 1.97% only because of Quarter 4.
Below are my returns:
Also, my favorite part of my report, if you have been following me you know how low my fees are. I have saved a total of about $150,000 in just fees since 2008. That’s enough to purchase two brand new expensive cars, a 100% electric Nissan Leaf and a Telsa Model S:
And my diversification plan:
Steve’s Bio
Stephen A. Schullo, Ph.D. (UCLA ’96) taught in the Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) for 24 years and UCLA Extension teaching educational technology to student teachers. Steve wrote investment articles for the United Teacher-Los Angeles (UTLA) union newspaper for 13 years. Thrice featured retirement plan advocate in the Los Angeles Times and U.S. News and World Report. He co-founded an investor self-help group 403bAware for teacher colleagues and wrote 7,500 posts in three investment forums since 1997. Frequently quoted by the media, testified at California State legislative hearings and honored with the “Unsung Hero” award by UTLA for his retirement planning advocacy.
For the last thirteen years, he serves as a volunteer on LAUSD’s Investment Advisory Committee as a “Member-at-Large” and former co-chair. The committee contains collective bargaining reps from the unions and monitors the district’s tax-deferred retirement plans, 457b/403b, of 55,000 former and current LAUSD employees, worth $2.5 billion in total assets.
He started this blog in 2012 to help all PreK-12 public school educators nationwide, especially his Los Angeles Unified School District colleagues. He belongs to a small national group of 403(b) advocates (mostly teachers) who want to bring closer attention to the 403(b). During the last 25 years, over 30 newspaper articles have been published and each one says the same thing, TSAs (Tax Sheltered Annuities) are terrible 403(b) plans and the salesperson gets the benefit from lucrative commissions and high costs. Nobody in educational leadership reads these articles NOR talk about the proper place for annuity products publically. We come together at 403bwise.com. Come on over if you want to join us so we can help our colleagues avoid these self-conflicted retirement plans, TSAs.