Thursday, July 02, 2009

1H09 Performance

It has turned out to be quite good in the US portfolio - what with markets going up and not. 10% YTD in 2009 (indices are up 1%-2%). I am now 10% below the peak in Oct 2007. I am playing it conservatively - these are my savings after all. The biggest money losers since Oct 2007 have been the UltraShorts (SKF and SMN). If I do a sleight of hand and convert dollars to INR - my currency of consumption - than I am up 10% or so in the past 2 years. A lot of people told me in June 2007 to convert dollars into Rupees as Rupee was at 40 on its way to 30. So I can justifiably claim I have generated some alpha for myself.

I will now start running a proper portfolio for the Indian markets too. Kotak Securities has such a bad user interface that I never bothered to do anything systematic. Sometimes, the interface doesn't work during market hours. Then, they calculate profit and loss from the cost basis and not on YTD basis, so it is quite a task to figure out YTD performance. Most frustratingly, they link the brokerage account to my bank account from which money gets debited or credited for each transaction - so it is extremely difficult to figure out the average invested amount over a period of time itself. As a result, I have multiple brokerage accounts, and I have no idea of my IRR.

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