About 2.5 years ago, I wrote a post about how I managed to manage my parents’ investment/retirement portfolio. I took up that task mainly because I saw an opportunity to:
- Determine how much they needed to save to have a comfortable retirement income
- Their expected retirement income
- Moving them away from risky or highly commissioned investments
I’ve managed to do all the above to varying degrees of success.
In the past 3 years with the COVID-related stock index crashes around the world, it’s been an interesting ride for their retirement portfolios.
While I’m a staunch follower of passive investing, the news of COVID spread led me to over-index on portfolio conservatism in the early months of 2020 and with great luck, sell a good portion of my parents’ investment leading up to the crash.
When it did crash, I was also able to slowly purchase other securities back up the ‘V’ shaped recovery. I’m making it sound very positive, but it was scary.
The reality is, I’ve managed to hug closely but still trailing a low-cost, balanced ETF (i.e. 60/40 portfolio) when benchmarking my performance over the last five and a quarter years.
It’s shows a few things:
- I still don’t know what I’m doing.
- I still think I do know what I’m doing or think that the last couple years have made me a better portfolio manager.
For the most part, I’ve found some direction in the recent year from factor-investing philosophies. Ben Felix from PWL Capital and his podcast the Rational Reminder has made a huge difference in converting me. Since learning more about him and his research, I’ve re-arranged my parents portfolio to closely follow the Rational Reminder Model Portfolio.
Not sure how it goes on from here, but I find that following a model portfolio is better than thinking I can beat the market with stock picks. While I do that for my own portfolio, I cannot keep up with reading 10qs and 10ks and annual reports, to be able to win at this investing game. And at the end of the day, for my parents, it’s about security — in their income and for the future. At the end of the day, it’s your goals that matter most.