2019 holds an important milestone in my life/ career, It marks the completion of decade in the working life after my post graduation. In 2009 coming out of college with PGDM in finance was not a fun memory, Still there were the smog of financial crisis and the future was blurred. Most companies, which came during placement season, were doing the favor by hiring. You were surely not expecting the huge sum of money or awesome career start barring few lucky souls. Some of us have to go through the pain/ mental agony seeing some of the offers rescinding just before joining the companies. Though fast forward to 2019, It is one of the longest bull run in the history without any major corrections in US, even when the global growth has been sluggish. Lot of wealth has been created in the last decade across the globe. Yesterday, I read the news about how various asset classes performed in 2019. Nifty returned 13%+, Gilt funds returned 12%+, Gold had the dream run of 20%+ and even though the real estate didn’t give a lot of capital appreciation, it’s rental yield’s were still quite robust. If you failed to generate the returns in 2019, you need to revisit the portfolio or your strategy of investing.
In 2019, I am mostly happy about meeting my target corpus amount which currently stands at 17x+ of my annual expenses in India (Though only 5.5x to my revised expenses being in Hong Kong). The important part was that the return on investment itself were roughly 3.5x of my first annual salary in 2009 :), Alas my current expenses are 8x of my first salary (Wondering why? Learn about lifestyle inflation). Highlights were as below:
Top 3 return generating investments during 2019 on XIRR basis:
- Gold +20%
- Large Cap Funds +15%
- Medium Term Debt Funds +11%
Top 3 Drivers of Net-worth growth:
- Top continues to be saving out of earnings
- Return on Debt funds
- Rental Income
Top 3 learning in 2019 for Investment Journey:
- Target Corpus/ Goal is always a best benchmark to use and beat. You have all the three levers of finance to beat/ acheive it
- Portfolio re-balancing matters a lot, I have kept gold in portfolio for last 5 yrs up to 5% and each year it was a laggard with low single digit returns to no returns. This year the jump of 20%+ brought the XIRR of 10%+
- It is always better to let go extra 1% returns to reduce the unwanted risks
Top 3 Posts of 2019:
- Lessons From Nifty History
- Modern Portfolio Theory & Its Applications
- Retirement Planning 101: Know your corpus required
Top 3 Readings in 2019:
Wish you all a very Happy New Year & Prosperous 2020! Happy Investing!
Edu-form 