Some honesty

I'm not having a good year. My fiscal "Year 1" (October 1, 2008 through September 30, 2009) was pretty good. I had a return of over 21%, easily beating the Dow Jones and S&P. Below is a graph of my YTD returns, "Year 2" (October 1, 2009 through May 24, 2010).
I've been posting my cumulative returns on this blog, so while I'm still beating the Dow Jones since October 2008, I would have been better off since October 2009 if I had put all of my money in an index. In fact, after the 11%+ plummet in the market this month, I'm down for the year.

Obviously, this market correction was an opportunity. After being extremely patient, last Thursday I moved some more money into my brokerage account and doubled my AgFeed position. I bought shares at $3.03, bringing my average cost down a full dollar per share (from $4.98 to $3.98). AgFeed started rallying today on good news out of China, ending the day up 6%+. I think I nailed that one.

Greece did that?!?

Investor A: "Good G-d! What is that unbearable whooshing sound?"
Investor B: "That's the stock market plummeting past us."
Investor A: "Was it pushed out of a window? It's falling so fast!"
Investor B: "It may have been, ask those guys over there."

CEOs of the Nasdaq and NYSE point accusingly at each other

I guess the past six days made for a useful experiment. I had previously estimated that my portfolio had a beta of 2. If the Dow Jones were to rise 1%, my stocks should rise by twice that. So now that the Dow Jones has dropped more than 7% in the past six days, my portfolio has fallen, as expected, about 14.5%. Math high five!