Hey guys, it's Sasha I made a return of 62% on stocks so far in 2023. That means for every dollar I had invested at the beginning of the year I now have $162 and I don't talk about my portfolio very often at all on the channel I checked and I think I haven't made a single update this whole year, but seeing as I do talk a lot about investing about personal finance, managing money I wanted to share what I did this year to get my 62% return? What I currently hold in my portfolio? Why currently hold it? and most importantly I want to talk about what I am going to do with my investments next year because I feel next year could well be even better now before I get started I Know there will be the obligatory comments saying Sasha you should have gone all in on Bitcoin because Bitcoin's up 150% this year or Sasha if only you yoed all in on Tesla you would be up 135% this year. Or maybe if I still had a position in Palante as I did 2 years ago. paler would be up 189% this year.

And the answer to every one of those is I do not care I don't care for two reasons: First, I am not here to get the perfect home run 200% return every single year because that's not how the real world works and I understand that I Also know that going all in on one stock is a very popular strategy here on. YouTube with investing gurus who don't understand pretty much anything about how long-term investing Dynamics work or why is mathematically a really bad idea. and second, I prefer the low and slow approach because my investing Horizon is longer than 3 seconds and I'll tell you what I am very happy with a 62% return I Use Vti as my Benchmark Vti is a full stock market index and Vti is up 24% so far this year. So I've beaten my Benchmark this year, but it's actually not all that impressive because my strategy relies on me beating the index when we have a good year because I also tend to lose a lot to the index in a bad year like last year because I am an active investor and I pick my stocks which is not a good idea I tend to get an exaggerated version of what happens in the stock market.

So this year the stock market is up 24% overall and I am up 62% but last year Vti was down 19.5% as the market crashed I was down 47.3% But actually I did worse than losing just 47.3% last year because I was depositing money into Investments throughout that year and if you take the annualized version of my returns, it was minus 53.8% That's really pretty bad. I would need a return of over 100% just to get back to where I was at the beginning of 2022. So my strategy carries a whole lot of risk. It swings up and down, but I'm fine with it because I understand the risk.

In 2021, just before the stock market started crashing I started my public Man versus the market portfolio and this is what I said at the time and I struck some lucky streaks. Uh, but the dark month are going to come. We're going to have Market crashes, We're going to have stock selling off and all kinds of wild things happening. and I'm sure some of these are going to hit this portfolio really hard, so watch out for those cuz those videos are going to be not quite as rosy as this one.

and then the market will be laughing as the market is doing much better than I am. But so far so good. You might also notice that this random guy on YouTube looks like a disheveled Neanderthal He seems to have a lot of hair here and here and never mind. I On the other hand, have a lawn Mod 5.0 Ultra from Manscaped who are the sponsors of today's video.

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So for full transparency, here is my return. Since I started the challenge. This man versus the market portfolio is a small public portfolio that I share on YouTube The stocks in here are the same as my main positions in my core portfolio in roughly the same proportion. so my overall returns are very much the same.

You can see that in 2021 when I started this challenge, I made a return of 33.1% while the stock market over the same time frame got 9.7% Because I only started Midway through 2021, the annualized return that year was 64% compared to 177% for Vti. Then 20122 happened and my portfolio got hit hard because I have a lot of grow stocks and grow stocks don't like inflation. They don't like high interest rates. so I went down 47% or 54% on an annualized basis.

Now to compare apples to apples. the Vti performance here is not just Vti in 2022 because in 2022, Vti was down 19.5% but here in this table, it's only down 13.5% and 16.3% annualized. And this is because I mimic this calculation based on the date on which I made cash deposits into this portfolio and I calculate what the Vti return would be if those cash deposits went straight into the index on those same dates. But anyway, 2022 was bad.

But at the end of 2022, everyone was predicting the biggest ever stock market collapse recession in 2023, it's going to be brutal most most. Financial YouTubers were very strongly advocating and recommending that you should sell all of your stocks in December of 2022. Everone was panicking I of course, am not a degenerate clown. so I stayed invested in the stock market and the reward for that is that my portfolio has gone back up by a lot.

But here look my cumulative return since I started. this challenge is still negative minus 4.3% which comes out atus 2.2% on an annualized basis. At the same time, Vti is up 10.6% or 5.2% annualized. So as it stands, I am losing to the stock market index.

Proving the point that I make over and over on the channel which is the stock market index is probably the best investment for the vast majority of investors. If I did not do this and I just parked my money at the same time into the index, I would be doing better right now. but long term I am very happy, very comfortable with my performance, and if I have another year with an outsized return that tends to happen when there is a good year like 2021 or 2023, this portfolio May well go back ahead. So here is this specific account and you can see that I hold six positions in here.

The biggest position is Tesla which has ballooned to be 30% of the portfolio total, which is ridiculous. It is way more than what I want to carry in anyone's stock, but it's just a factor of Tesla going up 135% so far this year and I haven't been actively rebalancing down. Pinterest is my next biggest position. Pinterest is up 65% this year and the third biggest position in the portfolio is Fiverr.

Fiverr is the only position that I currently hold where I am still down overall on the position because I started buying into Fiverr on the way down in 2021, but the stock has been absolutely smashed by interest rate increases last year. A bunch of other stuff. Fiverr is a very small and a very early stage type of investment with a lot more risk than most of my other. Holdings The company has been performing great though revenue is growing very strongly.

Bang on target. the company has just gone profitable. All of that is really good. The numbers are looking great, but the stock is doing really badly and has gone absolutely nowhere this entire year.

The interesting thing is, out of all of my positions, Fiverr has by far the biggest upside of my valuation models, so we'll have to wait and see what happens with that. now. next up, I have a big position in Google Google is up 51% So far this year, they haven't actually had a particularly good year. they've been outplayed on the AI FR by Microsoft Amazon is smoking them on other fronts.

They aren't doing very well with antitrust lawsuits, a bunch of other stuff, but I think the company is very well positioned for the economy rebound next year when the price of ads online should bounce back and they should profit very nicely from that. then. I also have two smaller positions in Airbnb and in Twilio. I actually only opened my Airbnb position at the beginning of this year, so this one's brand new, but the stock is already up 34% since I did that, and Tlio is also up 51% so far this year.

So a pretty consistent year. but what about next year? Well, one problem I now have is that Airbnb and Google are pushing up against my Target prices. Airbnb is just 8% away from my fair price valuation and Google is 15% off. So if this current run continues, there is a pretty high chance that I'm going to sell Airbnb and maybe Google at some point very soon.

This year, I only sold out of one stock AMD I sold it around here when it hit $10 but the AI wave is now pushing the stock even higher since I sold. So going into next year, it looks like I may need to do some redistribution because six stocks is already low. it is very concentrated. It is way too tight, and if I sell one or two, I am going to become very concentrated.

so I don't want to redistribute into the same positions I already hold in the moment at the moment. In fact, I probably should divest from some of the positions to balance it out. So I'll be opening two or three new positions as a result, probably very soon. I'll still see some very reasonable upsides on Twio, and Pinterest and Tesla and fiver have much bigger upsides.

So those positions are staying right where they are for now, but 2024 is looking very exciting in terms of investing. From my perspective, inflation is done in the US So interest rates are done. They're not going to continue going up. They're going to start coming down next year in the last few days.

Jerome Pow Alluded to the fact that they might start reducing interest rates by just a little bit. just 0.75% next year and the stock market went absolutely Ben Bas when that came out. Now when they actually start cutting interest rates, when that actually happens, the stock market should get pretty interesting. My portfolio is very susceptible to interest rate movements.

that's why I got smashed in 2022 and that's why I Expect maybe to see some of that reversal next year. because grow stocks are valued on numbers. Many years into the future, the market tends to Discount a lot more if interest rates are higher. They also increase the risk of those businesses going under.

It doesn't make a huge amount of sense mathematically, necessarily, because the discount rate that these people use is always way higher than the current interest rate. Most people use a discount rate of between 10 and 15% but there is a load of second order effects I Guess you know fund managers Park their money in bonds to get high yields blah blah blah as always I will share some of the hot takes a lot of the Insight any of the analysis that I do in my Discord if you're a Patreon or a Channel member, I'll see you in there with updates as and when they happen. And thank you to Manscape for sponsoring this video. Make sure you go and check out their silky smooth offer in the description or in the pinned comment.

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