Hi Clive, Re: .... You can lead a horse to water .....
That reminds me of a modified version of this my dad used to say:
You can lead horses to water......
but if they walk away without drinking......
all you see are a bunch of thirsty horses' asses....
It never seems to fail with these two people (not clients, just friends). They always call and ask if they should clear their portfolios of risk just when I'm the busiest buying additional shares with AIM's guidance. It's also been when my risk indicator has finally dipped to its Bullish territory. Both are addicted to business news stations. That tells us a lot all by itself. The talking heads do truly influence a portion of their viewers' actions.
As far as "how are we doing so far?" type questions, "benchmarking" is a game that should be played for fun and not punishment! As I mentioned in this post (Ultimate Buy and AIM portfolio) if we look around sometimes we'll find an 'index' that does generally mirror our portfolio design.
Another portfolio of mine is made up of nine filtered domestic U.S. sector index ETFs. Their filtering method tends to push the portfolio toward the mid-cap part of the available stocks. Further, their construct then tends to be weighted nearly, but not quite equal weight. During some broad market moves it generally follows along with the Russell 3000. But for 2015, my portfolio didn't match very well with that index. The Russell 3000 is a cap weighted index that is really only an expansion of the S&P 500 and includes all the giants. So, it's not really a "mid cap" index at all. Further, my sector weights are different from the S&P500 and the Russell 3000. So, my heavy mid cap portfolio with nearly equal weights just doesn't match very well.
So, I guess I'm just not into self-flagellation! :-)
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