It is that time of the year when everyone involved in this business looks in the rear vision mirror and attempts to make sense of what happened. And of course to everyone involved everything is so obvious and predictable. What is worse is that they take this data and attempt to make some form of prediction about the year ahead. Hindsight is all we have and whilst it is the perfect investment tool; we are denied its luxury in the real world. Even looking at a league table of performance of various instruments is somewhat meaningless. However, since they are all the rage below is one such table I quickly knocked up for a few common instruments.
Part of the problem is that these tables are looked at from the perspective of the buy and hold investor. It is assumed that you simply bought one of everything last year and held onto it and your performance either good or bad is a function of this. However, this is not how trading works. For example the AUD/USD began the year with a 15% gain, which is then gave back and settled into a meandering decline resulting in its ordinary year on year performance. Likewise all the gain in heating oil came in the first half of the year. Conversely, cocoa which turned in a shocker traded in a range for most of the year and then collapsed in October.
Whilst it is twee to say so in trading only the journey counts not the destination, in fact I would go a little bit further and say that even the starting point is irrelevant. As such tables such as the one above whilst vaguely interesting are essentially irrelevant to us.
