Year 2015 in review

As the year 2015 has just ended, let's take a look at how the year has treated me. 

Annual rings by Liga Eglite on Flickr

If and when I have time later, I'll elaborate some points further.

Portfolio valuation and savings

This year has been a really interesting one for me personally but on the savings front it has been rather boring actually. I've been making monthly contributions to my portfolio and that's mostly it.

Without further ado, here's my 2015 results. The blue line is the value of my portfolio and the red line is cost of the portfolio.

Portfolio valuation and savings. The blue line is the value of my portfolio and the red line is cost of the portfolio.

Let's look at the numbers in more detail in a table:

	30.12.2014	31.12.2015	change
cost	38291 euro	50458 euro	+12167 euro
value	47866 euro	63820 euro	+15954 euro

So, during 2015 I contributed 12 167 euros to my portfolio, which is a bit over 1 000 euros per month. My net income was about 36 600 euros so that's a saving rate of about 33.2%. I have to say that I'm quite pleased with my savings.

Portfolio valuation and market craziness

The value of the portfolio appreciated by +3786.31 euros, which was an OK performance but certainly nothing special. The below chart shows the TWR return calculation (in blue, left scale) and the EUR/USD (in red, right scale) currency rate.

TWR return calculation (in blue, left scale) and the EUR/USD (in red, right scale) currency rate.

The chart shows the beginning of the year rally that we experienced: went up almost 15% from the beginning of the year until mid April. The year closed with about an 8% gain. That's a good result but it sure was a bumpy ride.
Quite a few positions in my portfolio are denominated in dollars so the dollar/euro rate impacts heavily on my valuation, as you can see my TWR and EUR/USD rate are somewhat negatively correlated. New purchases I'm currently mostly making in euros to reduce my currency risk.

Mortgage payments

During 2015 I paid off 4736 euros of my mortgage. There's still plenty left. As the euribor rates are super low at the moment, I don't see any reason to contribute more than minimum to mortgage for the time being.
I can't tell yet if this will be considered an investment or not but if were an investment, my total contributions to my net worth would be 16 903 euros or about 46.1% of my net income.

Conclusion

2015, you have been a boring year for saving, a crazy year for investing and a very interesting year for my personal life. Let's hope your sister, 2016 will be less crazy although we could be headed off a cliff.