May Investment Results

The upward trend continues! Although the DJIA is still in negative territory our investments from Januaruy 1, 2009 thru May 31, 2009 reflects a Personal Rate of Return of 11.4 %.

If you would like to know more about investment strategies please visit our Investment Planning articles.

April Investment Results

April shows a positive trend for the DJIA and our Fidelity account reflects the same trend with a gain of 5. 4%. We're finally going the right direction!

Have you minimized your risk and positioned your investments to perform well when the market begins to come back?

If you would like to know more about investment strategies please visit our Investment Planning articles.

Time-weighted formula

Fidelity Investments has an exclamation on their statements and their web site next to the field titled "Your Personal Rate of Return".

The exclamation states the following; "Your Personal Rate of Return is calculated with a time-weighted formula, widely used by financial analysts to calculate investment earnings. The calculated value reflects the result of your investment selections as well as any activity in the plan accounts shown. Other personal rate of return formulas may yield different results."

To better understand the term time-weighted we performed several searches. One of the searches produced the following definition from the site dailyvest.com: Time-weighted rate of return takes into account the amount of time an investor has been invested in a fund. It measures how well he or she performs in increasing the dollars that have been invested. Cash flows moving in and out of the fund do not affect the time-weighted rate of return.

Based on this definition we are confident the time-weighted formula is perfect for our comparisons against the DJIA.

Fidelity Loss in March

Our investment performance in 2009 still reflects a loss. However our portfolio, like the DJIA, has started an upward trend. Due to the fact our portfolio has been performing better than the DJIA we believe our portfolio diversification strategy is working pretty well.

During the period January 1, 2009 through March 31, 2009 the performance of the DJIA has been down about 16%, which is an improvement from last month which reflected a loss of 22%.

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Our return for the same period reflects a loss of 2.75% using Fidelity's time-weighted formula. We'll perform some additional research to make sure the calculation of the formula does not invalidate our performance.

If you would like to know more about investment strategies please visit our Investment Planning articles.

Fidelity Loss in February

As expected, our investment performance in 2009 reflects a loss. Despite this loss we believe we have successfully minimized our risk and we have positioned our investments to perform well when the market begins to come back.

The performance of the DJIA on a chart found at moneycentral.msn.com shows a the Dow dropped 22% while our account dropped 8.7% since January 1, 2009.








If you would like to know more about investment strategies please visit our Investment Planning articles.

Fidelity Investments

The downturn in the economy has pummeled the balances of most retirement plans and our account is certainly no exception.

We've decided to ignore our losses in 2008 and to focus on performance in 2009. With just a few clicks we can review our 2009 Personal Rate of Return at Fidelity Investments. We don't change our investment mix, we just like to see how we are performing compared to the the Dow Jones Industrial Average.








Today's review brought fantastic news!!! Our return for 2009 is "0."

Why is this fantastic? Check out the performance of the DJIA on a chart found at moneycentral.msn.com. While the DJIA is down, our Personal Rate of Return as of February 6, 2009, shows we have broke even in 2009.

Based on this information we believe we have successfully minimized our risk, and we have positioned our investments to perform well when the market begins to come back.

If you would like to know more about investment strategies please visit our Investment Planning articles.