I have been putting off the valuation of the portfolio because of a few factors mostly to do with my time!
But, I will do a quick and nasty estimate.
Of the original 10 companies, three have gone. Babcock and Brown (BNB) was an investment bank that overextended themselves in the good times and were wiped out by the financial fiasco. We lost all our money on that one.
Babcock and Brown Infrastructure was also immersed in or at least tainted with its parents problems and so when BBI eventually re-invented themselves, we ended up with one new share for every 50 old shares that we held. I consider this to be a complete write-off of our money as far as our portfolio goes.
Queensland Gas (QGC) was taken over by BG Group and we were paid $31,081 for our original $10,000 worth of QGC shares. This amount is cash which probably earned interest of say a conservative $1000.
Our active portfolio of the 7 remaining shares was valued at 71,410 on Friday 30 Apr 2010.
I don't have the time to work out the dividends we received, but lets say over the three plus years we got a conservative $7000.
Portfolio at 30 April 2010
1. 71,410 Shares
2. 31,081 cash
3. 1,000 interest
4. 7,000 dividends
Total = $110,491
It is not a lot for over three years of investing, but the world financial fiasco was very cruel and we are still ahead.
Also, we did not allow for intelligent reassessment of the companies in which we first invested. That is, when BNB started to look shaky, I sold my personal shares of both BNB and BBI to recover some of my capital. I also sold my personal SUN shares when I decided that the management team were not performing well enough. I sold my bank shares (ANZ) during the world financial crisis when it wasn't yet clear who may have had exposure (early on, even the Oz banks were unable to work out their exposure). I immediately reinvested the proceeds of all of these sales into resource companies (as I did with huge winnings from the QGC takeover). So my personal portfolio was able to come back on the upswing in very healthy condition indeed.
But for the PPRune portfolio, out of curiosity, I decided to let nature take its course and see where the "do nothing" strategy took us.
In essence since we first invested, we went straight into the worst crisis in our lives and after three years we have emerged with about 10% more than we started with...
...so just imagine where we would be in more normal times!
