Insightful Investing Newsletter January 2010
4th Quarter 2009 Market Recap
What started out looking like the world was coming to an end turned out to be a pretty good year for the stock market. In fact, by the numbers it was a fantastic year. The only sign of a negative number was last year’s shining star Managed Futures, which were down a couple of percent, and Long Term Bonds, which you should not have had in your portfolio anyway.
Where do we start? How about Emerging Markets Equities, up a whopping 79%. High Yield Bonds were not to shabby either, bringing home 58% for the year.
Unfortunately, we are still somewhat behind over the last couple of years, unless of course you had an Insightful portfolio. In that case, you should at least be even.
Taking a look at US Equities, Mid Cap Growth was the leader of the pack this year, returning 46%. Bringing up the rear, if you want to call it that, were Value stocks in general, which were only up 20% for the year, not surprising since these are the stocks that were hammered the worst in the first quarter of 2009.
Real Estate bounced back strongly as well, gaining 39% for the year. That asset class is still down 15% for the last 3 years, so there is a long way to go before we can claim that we have had a full recovery. Even so, you cannot really complain too much, we are a lot higher than we were last year at this time.
With big bounce in the equity markets, it is somewhat surprising that bonds held up pretty well, picking up a respectable 6% this year. TIPS almost doubled that, most likely because the increased government spending on the economy has many expecting inflation to kick up soon.
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