Hey guys it's sasha around five months ago, i started a little challenge. I called it man versus the market. The challenge was simple: was to set up a new, investing portfolio, share it publicly and see if i can beat the stock market now that does sound simple enough, but the absolute vast majority of investors out there, including established funds, do not beat the stock market in The long term, so i thought this would be a bit of fun now it is time to do a little update. I haven't done one for a while on how it is going and share some tips as well, while i'm doing it on what it is that i'm doing with this portfolio, and why it is that i am doing it.

I will share every single trade in the sports video and i'm going to explain why i made it and by the way i am doing way better than the stock market so far. I definitely didn't expect to get this sort of uh crazy growth this quickly. So, let's dive right in now. The platform that i have chosen for this challenge is called steak.

Steak is an investing apparatus in uk, australia and new zealand and is one of the best options out there for investing in u.s stocks, which is what i am doing in this competition in this thing that i set up steak was absolutely perfect for this challenge, because It is completely free to make trades in u.s stocks, for somebody like me who lives in the uk, and that was phenomenal when i was setting it up. Popular platforms like trading 202 or free trade will charge you a foreign exchange fee for each single transaction. Even though those are loyal to the cheap fees, you still have to pay them, but i don't have to pay them on stake. You do have to pay a 0.5 percent for an exchange fee when you put money into stake, and then you also have to pay that same foreign exchange fee when you withdraw the money back out.

But while it's in after you've paid that one fee, you don't have to pay anything, that's it pretty awesome for anyone who wants to invest in u.s stocks, long term and maybe move money between different stocks over time. By the way you can get a free share worth up to 150 dollars with stake. If you use my link in the description, create an account and make a minimum 50 pound deposit into that account. So if you want to get a free share for trying the platform out feel free to go and use that link in the description.

Now, let's look at this portfolio. First, i'm going to show you everything in the account and then i'll show you the excel. Where i track how it's been doing, and that's because stake like every other online investing platform, doesn't give you an accurate way of tracking your actual investing growth over time. It says over here that i am 1577 dollars up on my investments, which is great, but it is only on the investments that i currently have in my portfolio right now, so it doesn't count the investments that i used to have that i have since sold and If i reinvested the money relatively recently, it will then artificially reduce the growth if you like, because i'll only count it from that point, i'm gon na show you all of that in just a second bear with me.

I'm a little bit higher in terms of the growth than that 1577 figure. So at the moment i have five stocks in this portfolio and, if you've been following my channel, you probably won't be surprised at which stocks they are because these five stocks happen to make up more than 90 of my total investing portfolio outside stake as well. At the moment, i even made a whole video where i talked about these exact five stocks some time ago. These five stocks are amd, fiverr, lucid motors, palantir and tesla tesla, amd and lucid are by a ridiculous amount in this portfolio.

Palantir is up 14 so far and the fiverr move hasn't played out yet, and that is because i have invested very heavily into fiverr very recently after its price collapsed the growth there might take a few more quarters, but i am expecting some serious numbers. Okay. Let's look a little bit deeper. A few things have happened since i last made an update.

First off, i consolidated my positions down in august. I had far more stocks in this portfolio, but i was going through the financials of all of the companies that i was holding and i sold out of a bunch of them where i held smaller positions. Specifically, i sold adobe etsy, twilio, micron, apple square and twitter. All gone from this portfolio now i sold most of these because i just didn't think that the outlook for them over the next six to nine months looked as good.

As for some of the option, other options that i did want to have my money in. I actually still think that some of these companies will do well. Some of them are going to do really well in the long term, but here is me trying to beat the market in my own way by being a little bit more active a little bit more strategic and a bit more aggressive with the strategy. Apple was a tougher call than the rest, but on balance at the time i thought i could park the cash into a better spot when i was making that transaction.

As you can see here, i made all of these sales in august and september and i put a whole load of money into fiverr and smaller bits into lucid and palantir. So far, fiverr has not paid off. You can see. Fiverr was 175 dollars when i was buying and it is 176 dollars as i'm recording this video.

So no movement at all, lucid and parents are both doing pretty well and i'm particularly excited just to where palantir is headed. So we'll we'll watch that one. So i sold seven stocks uh and that seems to have played well on balance, despite the fact that fiverr, which is where most of the money hasn't gone, hasn't moved because twitter square, micro and twilio are all down and down by quite some bit. So i'm quite happy with having made those moves.

Apple share price is pretty much the same as when i sold it. It hasn't moved up with that it has in between, but at the moment it's the same and etsy and adobe are up. So i lost out and selling now, but on balance i am pretty happy with having made those calls, then you can see up here. I also got four free shares.

In the last week i got three gopro shares and one dropbox share, and so i sold those three shares and i bought palantir and more fiverr by the way. Those free shares are from people who, some time ago, clicked on one of my links and then they went and funded their account. So, thank you very much if you went and did it because i got a free share as well and you can still go and get a free share. If you use the link in description below uh anyway, you can see that the bulk of my portfolio is in tesla, and that is partly down to an intentional overweighting that i have placed on tesla stock.

I expected tesla stock to make a big move and i even made three separate videos saying exactly this and explaining why in the last couple of months and then guess what tesla stock did move, it went nuts and tesla very quickly joined the one trillion dollar company Club and so naturally, because i already placed a relatively large amount of money into tesla and then tesla grew so much as well. Tesla's share of that total portfolio has also increased as a result. The other good news is that my two other biggest positions have also done very well, and that probably is a little bit to do with why i was placing a bit more money in them. I sort of thought that they were going to be moving a bit more quickly.

So that's why i weighted them. Amd is up 54 here and lucid is up 42, so the portfolio total at the moment is 4792.61 pretty happy with that. Here's a spreadsheet that i use to track performance and that should explain it in a bit more detail here on the left. You can see the deposits i've added the free shares here as deposits at the bottom, so that we can properly compare returns so that it's all fair, the total amount invested, including those is three thousand one hundred and thirty three dollars and thirty four cents.

And you can see that i stuck that 4792 up here as the current value of the portfolio and then i have this little rough calculator. It just does some basic math and it says that i have made a 52.96 return so far on this portfolio. It's just the ratio of that four seven, nine two over the three one, three three and then uh. This is not too bad.

I am laughing. This is ridiculous, and then i have uh the two big deposits over here. You can see in may and june. They only happened 5.6 and 4.4 months ago under half a year on those deposits.

So when i then go and work out the annualized version of the return, the number becomes crazy, because what i do is i use a money weighted average time that that money's being invested so i go and look at how much i've invested. Then i look at how long that's been invested for and i work out what the average time my money's been in the market by doing that, and then i just use that to sort of convert that 52 return to what the annual equivalent is so far and That gets me 185 hilarious. It's ridiculous! It's stupid, uh! This is a hundred percent, not going to be a 185 return in six months time or whenever it is uh when we hit the one year mark. But it's pretty funny, although it has been growing recently but anyway, then on the right.

What i do is i compare this to vti vti is the vanguard, total stock market index, and that is the index that i chose to try to beat and all of the companies that i have are in that index. Most of them are bigger the same for vti i have lucid, which is one of the smaller ones, which is not one of the really big ones. So it's kind of like very similar distributions, and it makes sense to compare it and, as i'm recording this video vti is at 234.10 and the important numbers are these ones. You can see on the right over here.

This just takes the exact same kind of calculation that i did for my own investments and tries to replicate them for vti it kind of presumes. It takes each of the deposits that i have made in a table on the left and it calculates what the return would be if i made those investments on that day into vti instead of whatever i was putting it in. That's why i have the vti price. Next to each of those deposit numbers, which is the price it was on that day and the vti return, if i did, this would be six point, four three percent and the annualized version of that is sixteen point: six percent by the way.

Sixteen point: six percent per year from the stock market is one heck of a return. That is a really really good level of return, because it is far higher than the 97 that you would expect on average, so vci so far is actually doing pretty well. But at the same time so far i have had a ridiculous awesome start and the first half a year of this challenge. We are smashing the vti so pretty happy with that.

It is going to be fun when this portfolio gets completely destroyed when it gets smashed. In the next tech sell-off or in a market crash - and we see the numbers coming coming down and it'll be interesting to see, how does it fare compared to the index, because that is when the power of the index is really going to shine. But we'll have to wait and see how that exactly plays out and when exactly it plays out stay tuned for more updates on this man versus the market series. If you like this video, don't forget to smash the like button for the youtube algorithm.

Thank you. So much for watching, i really really appreciate it and, as always i'll see you guys later.