EOFY Dodgy Excel Time

With the EOFY it was time to fire up excel and play with some stock returns. I took the S&P/ASX 50 and decided to see how each stock had fared during the year, this gave me the table below which I have sorted on the basis of highest to lowest.

In terms of observations about the years performance there really isn’t anything that hasn’t been discussed before but some points are worth repeating –

1. Generally the bigger you are the more modest your performance.

2.The older you are the more modest your performance – this tallies with what I have written about stagnation.

3.If you have been buying the largest stocks in the belief that they insulate you from rubbish performance or because you feel you know them then you are wasting your time. This is a constant theme – traders waste so much time because they do not take a step back and actually look at the market as a whole. They are too caught up in myopic thinking that stems from ignorance.

4.It is not surprising that fund managers cannot make money – they insist on sticking religiously to the points above.

5. It was a hard year for stock pickers.

It also wouldn’t be dodgy excel day without a pretty chart.