Free-quent Flyer
Blogger
I recently wrote a post on my blog about "Robinhood," an app that is designed to make it as easy as possible to lose as much money as possible day trading publicly traded stocks and ETFs.
I've been fooling around with it for a few months now, and thanks to my years of experience, deep business savvy, and clairvoyant sense of the national mood, have made $32.23. In other words, I've been gambling. Gambling is fun.
Anyway, as people who actually invest in order to meet financial goals know, you don't compare your investment returns to cash, you compare them to the returns you'd get investing in a low-cost benchmark fund. So I decided to see how my portfolio compared to a "synthetic" portfolio of VTI (Vanguard Total Stock Market ETF) traded on the same days as all my purchases and sales. Vanguard has a tool that shows historical price data by day, but I didn't bother figuring out the hour-by-hour price changes, so this is not totally scientifically sound since there are daily price swings I didn't account for.
The attached file shows all my trades (I am actually still holding IP and VXUS, but I wanted to include them for illustrative purposes). For each trade date, I include the price I paid for each security, and the price I would have paid for the same NUMBER of corresponding shares of VTI. Since the securities are traded at different prices you shouldn't pay attention to the nominal values, but rather the percentage changes in value between purchase and sale. In other words, mentally scale the purchases by price, as I do in row 28 of the excel spreadsheet.
Also this doesn't take into account the cost of funds, which over 2 months should be basically nothing but, you know, it's a thing.
So, who wants to hire me to manage their hedge fund?
I've been fooling around with it for a few months now, and thanks to my years of experience, deep business savvy, and clairvoyant sense of the national mood, have made $32.23. In other words, I've been gambling. Gambling is fun.
Anyway, as people who actually invest in order to meet financial goals know, you don't compare your investment returns to cash, you compare them to the returns you'd get investing in a low-cost benchmark fund. So I decided to see how my portfolio compared to a "synthetic" portfolio of VTI (Vanguard Total Stock Market ETF) traded on the same days as all my purchases and sales. Vanguard has a tool that shows historical price data by day, but I didn't bother figuring out the hour-by-hour price changes, so this is not totally scientifically sound since there are daily price swings I didn't account for.
The attached file shows all my trades (I am actually still holding IP and VXUS, but I wanted to include them for illustrative purposes). For each trade date, I include the price I paid for each security, and the price I would have paid for the same NUMBER of corresponding shares of VTI. Since the securities are traded at different prices you shouldn't pay attention to the nominal values, but rather the percentage changes in value between purchase and sale. In other words, mentally scale the purchases by price, as I do in row 28 of the excel spreadsheet.
Also this doesn't take into account the cost of funds, which over 2 months should be basically nothing but, you know, it's a thing.
So, who wants to hire me to manage their hedge fund?
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