A.I.M. Users Bulletin Board

[SFSecurity]

Hi Gang, So I got to playing with Twinvest Combo and it looked a bit screwy to me given what was used for market prices and fractional share purchases so I redid it a bit so only whole shares would be bought and I used the monthlies for SPY for the last 5 years for comparison and a $250/month investment. Couldn't get the sale of stocks to work yet but what I did get very slightly better results without any sales and no fractional shares. Mind you neither would do as well in the context of having to pay commissions for regular stocks.

Even with TDAmeritrade taking over ScottTrade and lowering commissions to $6.95, the 60 months of trades would be a $417 hit on either, $4521.38 for the original and $4640.05 for the revised.

Anyway, the original got 5.33%/year and the revised got 5.456%/year. Not totally trivial but only $118.67 difference.

AIM doesn't do as well as Twinvest and B&H does much better at $25625.16, or 10.938%/year with a total of $10 in commissions.

Of course it is not fair to compare monthly investments to lump sum investments. And with low volatility AIM can't do anything for you, especially in a bull only market.

The real lessons to be gleaned from this exercise are that selection of the proper position is key to good results, and that easing into a position is often the way to go as one can take advantage of minor dips that AIM can't as you add to the position

Now to figure out how to get sales back and see if that makes any difference.

Best,

Allen