My Vanguard performance

I have a 401K at Vanguard that I don't contribute to anymore. Consequently, any changes in account value result from investment performance. Here's my performance (for periods ending Dec 31st.).


these are the averages for world allocation funds for ytd, 1 yr, 3yr, 5yr, and 10 yr:



My performance turns out to be pretty good. I used morningstar to find world allocation funds with similar performance to mine. This provides an estimate of my rank among world allocation funds:

5 yr rank: top 31%.
3 yr rank: top 13%.
1 yr rank worse than 86%.

Now, if you understand the math behind these things, you'll realize that while I outperformed the average, I also did it with less risk.

Below you see the performance of the best world allocation fund that beat my performance over 5, 3, and, 1 years. You also see the average performance for the world allocation category.



Looking at the big dip, the Waddell & Reed fund went from 40K to 22K. A drop of 20%. It still hasn't fully recovered. The average performance for the category went from 17K to 11,272; a drop of 33.7%.

In contrast , my portfolio dropped from 30,250 to 25,212; that's only 17% (see below). At the end of 2009 my portfolio had fully recovered and stood at 33K. (On the whole, not as good as Waddell and Reed, though).


Much better performance than average, with a lot less risk. Pretty good, pretty good. I certainly earned my investment management fees.