Under the Hood of My New Portfolio

About six months ago I wrote that my favorite ETF (VGT) made no sense to me because the top 10 stocks in the fund made up a majority of the overall portfolio. So I decided to make my own so-called ETF and invested an equal percentage into the top 8 stocks of VGT. Those 8 stocks were:

  1. Apple
  2. Microsoft Corp.
  3. Visa               
  4. NVIDIA Corp.            
  5. PayPal                       
  6. Adobe                       
  7. Cisco Systems Inc.               
  8. salesforce.com

The only companies I didn’t invest in were Intel and Mastercard. Although these are both great companies, I was looking for some higher growth opportunities. In retrospect, I probably should’ve swapped Cisco for MasterCard, but oh well. Maybe I’ll swap it out in the future. After much deliberation, I added Square (SQ) and CarGurus (CARG) (see my most recent post about why I like this stock) to round out the top 10. The returns will be a bit skewed against me because I’ve been adding to these positions over the past 6 months and CarGurus was only in my portfolio since last week, but for arguments sake I pretended as if it was in my portfolio since August. So lets see how this has been going for me over the past 6 months:

Portfolio 1 is VGT

Portfolio 2 is the top 10 companies of VGT

Portfolio 3 is my Frankenstein version of VGT

It looks like VGT (which I’m still invested in) is winning out from a return standpoint (19% return), but my portfolio wasn’t too far behind (16% return). I’m happy with this since CarGurus was a recent investment and still needs time to generate the returns I’m hoping it will. The top 10 portfolio (12% return) is lagging behind, which makes me happy about my decision to switch things up a bit. I’m in this for the long term so I don’t plan on selling these anytime soon. Maybe ever??? But so far, so good! My plan now is to continue to monitor VGT’s allocations and performance and add to my current positions as much as I can.