End of Month Summary – August 2008

August was a good month for me.  I finished with a realized gain of $578.95 and a paper gain of just $0.50 shy of $3,000.  A lot of that paper gain is making up from some of the paper loss I had in July and didn’t take (luckily).  I’ve been riding this month out slowly with less trades than usual due to my fear of what’s coming and trying to focus on work more as I promised myself in July’s End of the Month Summary.

I’ve worked my account back up to $99,113.19 according to Quicken and $98,876.38 according the TD Ameritrade.  I’ve always been puzzled why Quicken and AMTD don’t always match and figured it out recently.  Quicken’s quote updates aren’t always from the end of the day.  As long as it’s within a few hundred dollars I don’t sweat it.  If the two are off by more than that and I manually update Quicken.  TD Ameritrade is the one that matters of course.  Quicken is just to let me know how to benchmark my returns.

I didn’t make a deposit for August to this account and might not in September.  I actually want to hit that big $100,000 mark through growth now.  I made some aggressive deposits in the past few months and need to make sure I’m not loading up our investing account to the detriment of our savings account.  A new car is due for our garage within the next 12 months and I need to build up our savings some more for a solid down payment.  As much as I love growing this investing account, I really love lower fixed expenses.

The best part of my account’s August rally is that I’m beating all major indexes again.  Here are the numbers below for my returns and the indexes’.

Here’s how I compare the major indexes:

• 12 month Return: -3.00%
• Annualized Since 4/8/07 (blog’s beginning): +2.16%
• Deposits for month: None

According to Morningstar, here’s how the major indexes have done over the past 12 months:

• 1 year S&P 500 Return: -11.14%
• 1 year Dow Jones Return: -11.35%
• 1 year NASDAQ Return: -8.81%
• 1 year Russell 2000: -5.48%
• 1 year S&P Midcap 400:  -4.22%

The VIX ended the month at 20.65 and the VXN ended at 24.02 and both are sitting in that no man’s land that make it hard to pick a direction or make one want to buy too or sell too many options.  When we know Gustav’s affect on oil refiners within the next couple of days we’ll know how that could affect the economy.