Math is hard

Were we mathing wrong?

Are we looking at our portfolio performance all wrong? We tend to compare our performance against the S&P 500, or more accurately the SPY ETF that tracks the S&P. Really all of our comparisons so far have been going into Google finance and look at the chart of how our portfolio is doing versus how the S&P has done over that period. Basically, are we doing the math correctly?

Here's what has been sticking for us: If every time we made a purchase it was SPY instead of whatever we bought, how would we have done? Better? Since everything is a moving target with investing, different investment products are valued differently depending on the time. Our idea is to try and look at past purchase dates and compare those with how SPY was doing.

But what does this information get us? What conclusions do we draw? If SPY turns out to consistently best our choices, do we just keep buying that and talk about video games every Saturday morning instead? Probably not. It's good to have some baseline to compare it to, to check in and see how we're doing. What we decided is that it is word trying to figure out how to track this. We won't bore you with the details, but we'll keep you posted on how it is going.

Profit