MyIRAs.net - IRA Investment 70% Annualized Return

Investment is not an easy game. You may be very disappointed if you invested in mutual funds or followed the major market indexes in last few years wishing to achieve the expected +10% long term annualized return.

From August 1, 2001 to June 30, 2009, for the whole seven years and ten months, the market indexes gave you all negative total returns of -9.48% (NASDAQ), -24.10% (S&P500) and -25.19% (DJ 30) respectively. This is even less than bank's Certified Deposit interest return (CD's).

Our professional team, lead by our award winning Investment Strategist Dr. James Shaw, winner of MSN 1st million dollar investment contest, has made consistent investment returns over the years under all market conditions. This is achieved by our countless hours of hard work.

Here is how we performed: our annualized return is +70.42% from 2001-08 to 2008-07 and our total return is +8,306.58% from 2001-08 to 2009-06 (click here to see our performance).

The recent biggest bear market started from December 2007 and reached the low at around the end of February 2009. During this period, market lost about half of their values. Among them, S&P500 lost -46.91% , NASDAQ lost -48.22% and Dow John 30 lost -47.18%. But our Portfolio gained +72.51%.

We started our new Core Portfolio and Short Term Portfolio on February 1, 2009 and they gained +28.05% and +150.49% respectively in five months while the S&P 500 gained only +11.31% in the same five months period.

Our Portfolio returned one big winner followed by another one each and every month during this difficult period of time. In fact, the biggest winner came from the worst month the market performed: that is, +330.67% returns in 5 days on FRE during Sept 2008 after US government took over this troubled mortgage company (see "our complete trading record).

We strongly believe that the only way to achieve long term investment success is to have innovative investment strategies. There is no fixed strategy. The investment strategy has to keep pace with rapid changes of market conditions.

Since its inception in July 2001, our investment has been buy-and-hold. We identify undervalued stocks and buy it for long term gains. We never set stop losses as long as our view on the stock we selected does not change. Instead, we may double or triple our positions if stocks went down further after our initial buy. We have achieved over 70% of annualized return using this strategy.

But buy-and-hold does not work in bear market. In big bear market, you may lose 80% - 90% of your investment if you buy-and-hold. Short-and-hold may be the best strategy.

Because we cannot short stocks as our Portfolio is mainly for IRA investors and IRA investment accounts cannot short stocks, we have to make changes to meet the challenges ahead of us.

We took a quick action and closed all of our positions between December 31, 2007 and early January 2008. Hold 100% in cash in the next 30 days and avoided the first big crash in the market place.
Our professional team worked very hard to have developed a new short term investment strategy, called “5day3percent system”. That is, we want to identify beaten down stocks, which may bounce back 3% or more within 5 days and make quick profits from their bounce back.
We started a new $100k Short Term Portfolio trial on March 28, 2008 using this system and posted all of our buying/selling's on our blog in real-time. The trial lasted 9 months and the result has been remarkable.
From 03/28/2008 to 01/21/2009, we have turned $100k seed money into $1,055.000, a total return of over 1,000%. Click to see the week-by-week performance and all trading records of our trial Short Term Portfolio.
We reduced our explore to the US stock market. We only invested about 50% of our cash most of time in 2008. While we still buy-and-hold stocks, we did many short term trades using our short term trading strategy.
We formally launched our Short Term Portfolio service on February 1, 2009 after nearly one year trial. Now we have two sub-Porfolios using two different investment strategies. Our Investment Strategy section gives you the detailed descriptions of the two strategies. The Week-by-Week Performance of our Short Term Portfolio since inception can be seen here

In the investment world, no strategy is the best one. There will always be better ones.

Changes we have. We will continue working hard to develop new better investment strategies to meet the challenges from the changing world.