Another Year Wrapped Up

Well, 2010 is now officially in the books. I ended the year with a 7.7% return for the year - below my original goal of 1% gain per month but ahead of my revised goal of 0.5% gain per month. I finished behind the 2010 gains for the major indices (TSX, S&P, NASDAQ, etc.) but I only averaged an investment rate of about 50% for the year (with the rest in cash at any given time, ready to deploy), so I had an easier time sleeping at night than if I had all my cash invested and had to put up with the big market swings all year. I finished 2010 near my high for the year (up 8%), which I hit on December 30th.

Going into 2011 (Canadian trading to begin on Tuesday, January 4), I am 33% invested with the rest in cash. I currently own ARE, BIN, HSE, OCX, S, SC, TRP, and YLO. For Tuesday, I am looking at more securities that are in BUY territory - HNU, BBD.b, COS.un, ECA, LIF.un, PWF, and QBR.b. I am also looking at CCO, which is already in HOLD territory and the outlook for uranium looks positive for 2011.

I will also deposit $5K into my TSFA account on Tuesday, to get the money in there as soon as I can. It will be the third year that we are eligible to contribute to the TFSA and the third year that I have done so. My original $10K is up to $12,760 so I have over a 25% return so far (I am am sure there are many people with better TFSA returns, but I am happy with this). I know I won't be able to keep this up every year but after 20 years of putting money into the TFSA I hope to have a tidy sum there to augment my RRSP and cash accounts.

Looking back over the last 26 months, I have monthly gains in 21 of those months, I was down in 4 of those months, and I was even for 1. Although I go trade by trade according to the moving average graphs, I do evaluate my performance on both a monthly and yearly basis.

I am still looking to refine my approach somewhat to make the returns even better and to reduce the amount of time I spend on looking at my stocks (even though I only spend 15 minutes per day now). One of the things that I started doing was putting in stop losses to protect gains even when I wasn't near the sell indicator on the graphs.

For January, I plan to ONLY sell when the graphs tell me to and to try to trust the difficulty of getting through the lines to maintain gains. There are many securities that I sold on a gain during weakness that then continued to move up and I never got back into them again. The ETF's for the indices, like HQU, HSU, and HXU are prime examples of this. I made money on them all but I was stopped out of them early and missed subsequent large gains over the coming months. I will evaluate in January how this approach works out for me and report back here.

I wish everyone a profitable 2011 and I hope you had good gains in 2010. If you have any questions or comments, please post them here and I will be happy to respond.