No. of Recommendations: 8
You mention the impact of currency on reported results, but you don't clearly state in which currency you are measuring to report a +19.3% return. I think it can be inferred that it is USD. Can you confirm?
Yes, sorry if I wasn't clear.
The most meaningful view would probably be that it was 19.3% measured in US dollars, made up of a tailwind of 10.4% fall in the trade weighted US dollar, plus actual "global purchasing power" earnings of 8.9%. From that 8.9% I should subtract some sort of weighted average 2025 inflation rate among rich countries. That seems to have been around 2.8%, so a real currency-neutral return of around inflation+6.1%. Nice, but far from extraordinary.
I did a little better in my smaller secondary account, which averaged around 1/6 as big. Total profit in USD was 35.7% of the average USD account balance, while the average month-end cash allocation was 41.3%. No leverage, very few trades. A couple of big lucky picks, basically: most of the year it was just the same 3-4 stocks.
Jim
