Still index investing. I've posted my returns before. Everyone else has just said "oh yeah I made a ton of money off Facebook!", quotes only those returns, and doesn't give any actual data on how their overall portfolio has performed over the years. Presently I'm sitting at about a 9.1% IRR going back to 2004, but I wasn't investing with "real" money until mid 2009 (I think it's about 10.1% since then). No intention of changing my strategy any time soon. Presently my mix is 30% Canadian equities (XIC or HXT), 15% Canadian bonds (VAB), and the other 55% in US/international equities (disaster of VT, VTI, VGK, VPL, VWO, and VXC). Over time I'll up the bond portion to get closer to a 70/30 or 60/40 equity/bond split, but I'm in no rush as risk is fairly irrelevant to me at this point. No intention of touching any of that money any time soon.
I've also got a few hundred K invested in a few other exempt market type things with a friend who's a CFA. Too early to tell how that stuff is doing, it's been just under a year. Two are REITs, another is a private equity group that buys and runs small/medium businesses, and the last is supposed to be a non-correlated hedge fund (Manulife GARS) that'll probably be the first one I tell him to liquidate. Stupid high MER on that last one that chisels away half the gross returns. I probably should have told him I wasn't interested the second he gave me performance data on it that was gross and not net of fees.
I've also invested in a couple condo projects that my company is involved with. One is just wrapping up now and I should see something like 150-160k back from an 100k investment in a small 36 suite project, in somewhere around a year and a half. That's if they sell the last few suites by the fall/winter, for a bit less than originally thought. If they don't sell by then or are blown out cheap, then the returns will be a bit lower. My bro and I got in right before they started construction and after they'd sold the majority of the suites, because one of their original investors had pulled out. So we had next to no risk, didn't have to do fuck all work wise, and were in the same position as the other half dozen or so investors who'd had their money in the project for a year or more longer than us. Needless to say, that investor group wasn't over sophisticated, but they're all really good, honest guys, so we may continue to invest with them if they do another project.
The other project is a much larger one. 30 stories, 200+ suite apartment building downtown. The intent there is likely NOT to sell as soon as the project is completed, occupied, and stabilized. More likely, the investors will retain that asset for 10-20 years. The investment on this one is a lot more money, in the low 7 figure range between my bro and I. It's far more than either of us would normally be interested in investing, but by committing to invest the developer has agreed to sole source us for the mechanical installation on the project. Each part has to make sense, though. I'm not losing money on the investment just to get the work, as the investment itself is worth several times what we could possibly make on the project. And we aren't going to drop our shorts on the mechanical contract just to make the rest of the investors richer. We've never done something like this before, nor has our dad, so it's definitely a bit uncomfortable in that regard. The guys on the other side of the table are good guys, but they're used to dealing with pension and hedge funds etc when seeking equity investment, so we're a bit nervous that we're going to get played. We'll see, I guess! If their projections are even somewhat accurate, it should be a 10-15% IRR investment over the long term, if not better. Or it could be a total dud. Gotta love leverage.
Back to index investing. If you're a Canadian and considering it, it's very worthwhile to read through a shitload of blog posts from here:
Canadian Couch Potato
I had to figure a lot of that stuff out for myself, as when I started there were very few good resources for Canadians wanting to index invest.