Paul Vs The Market

Hello! It’s been far, far too long.

I haven’t posted updates here in a very long time. How long? We’re a few days away from the end of the year and I still haven’t posted a third quarter Freedom Portfolio recap. Not only am I a whole three months behind on a quarterly recap, but that quarterly recap also doubles as the fourth year anniversary recap. It’s embarrassing. I could chalk it up to the normal things (three kids and a full time job take up a lot of time, writing about portfolios growing is a lot more fun than writing about them plummeting, etc), but I frankly don’t have any good excuses.

But I am determined to get back on track, and I have a plan.

First off, I will be abandoning the 2022Q3 update for obvious reasons. It will simply be lost to the sands of time. The next update will be the 2022Q4 update that hopefully comes out in a few weeks.

My next update will be a recap on my 2022 bold predictions (spoiler alert: they were absolutely horrible) and my 2023 predictions. Hope to have that written and out by the end of this upcoming weekend.

The fantasy investing schedule is going to be tweaked a bit. The end of the year is already pretty busy for PvtM with a pending quarterly recap, my bold predictions, and fantasy investing. But there’s no reason the fantasy investing season has to overlap with the calendar year. For my own sanity, I’ll be bumping the start of the fantasy investing season to February in order to spread things out a bit. So going forward, the fantasy investing season will be running from February to January.

The 2022 season still ends in a few days, though, and while a lot can happen in a few days, I feel like it’s pretty safe to call things early. As a reminder, the current results can be found here.

• The winner looks destined to be the market, with a roughly 19% drop for the year.
• Second place looks to be safely held by Daniel, the proxy market, with a close to 20% drop for the year.
• Third place (and first among actual stock pickers) looks to be wrapped up by Gurkie with a drop of around 29%. Her returns were boosted by the positive return of IBM.
• Our hero, Paul, had a truly horrific return of -59%. I was somehow able to identify not just one, but two stocks that had a near 90% drop in 2022: RDFN and FUBO

Hopefully everybody has a better 2023!

While the purpose of Paul vs the Market is to try to beat the market and thus, the low fee passive index funds that track it, that doesn’t diminish the respect and admiration that I have for the “father of index funds” and founder of Vanguard: Jack Bogle. If you don’t know who he is, I encourage you to take a few minutes to read some of the tributes to his life that have come out last night and this morning. Jack Bogle did more to help the average investor than perhaps any other person and he did it all despite most everybody thinking he was crazy at the time.

Rest in peace.