Mid-month performance update
I mentioned a few days ago we’d be putting through some updates to our historical performance stats in response to a major upgrade by our primary data provider (IEX cloud, the Intercontinental Exchange’s API service). I’m happy to write that most of the bugs in their historical pricing database seem to have been worked out by now and, accordingly, we’ve updated everything on the back end over here at Stoney Point. With that preamble, below is latest cumulative performance chart for our picks from May 4 (the first trading day for our inaugural stocks picks) through December 11 (the most recent trading day as of this writing. The chart pretty much speaks for itself: our Prime picks have blown the market out of the water to date. Our free Select picks haven’t been nearly as exciting (as expected), and are performing pretty much in-line with the Bogleheads 80-20 stock-bond portfolio recommended for a hypothetical “young investor.”
Some miscellany in regards to IEX’s platform upgrade:
IEX added a “fully-adjusted” measure of historical prices that incorporates adjustments for both splits and dividends (previously, they only offered split-adjusted prices). This will allow us to automate things quite a bit. Essentially, this measure of prices “bakes” the effect of dividends and corporate actions like stock splits into historical prices so that when you take P(t+1)/P(t)-1 your return will capture the true total return (and therefore we don’t separately need to adjust for dividends). It does mean that if you’re comparing the pricing we report to that provided elsewhere, you’ll need to be sure to compare the third parties’ adjusted prices (rather than their “raw” prices).
In a few cases, returns based on IEX’s current data appear to differ ever so slightly from what we previously reported. This could be due to minor calculation errors on our part, or it could be due to restatements or other adjustments on IEX’s side of things. In any cases, all differences were de minimis in magnitude and, in almost every case, the effect of the differences was to increase the performance of our Prime and Select picks (i.e., based on the most up-to-date data, which now is included everywhere on this site, it appears the performance of our picks has been even better than previously reported).
