Year 2014 Recap and moving forward in 2015

About a year and a half have passed since I started writing about investing strategies and I thought I could do a recap:

1. Asset Allocation. The most important factor out of the 3 that determines an investor's returns. The most basic being a combination of bonds and stocks. It is up to an individual's risk profile to decide what assets to buy, and percentage allocation to it. I also covered how to buy into different asset classes in Singapore. I implement this strategy through my Permanent Portfolio made up of US ETFs.
2. I touched on index investing in a few posts and how we shouldn't belittle the returns of investing regularly in STI ETF. This is a strategy even Warren Buffet encourages. I started accumulating STI ETF again in Dec 2014 after selling a portion of it earlier in the year, and plan to continue doing so in 2015.
3. Personally took on more risk in 2014 in exchange for higher returns by investing heavily in individual stocks. I had to make sure it is worth the effort and thus spent a great deal of time tracking my performance via
1. Money-weighted returns (a.k.a IRR)
2. Time-weighted returns (using Modified Dietz method)

Year	Time-weighted Returns	IRR
2013	7.8%	5.7%
2014	15.2%	15.6%

My Permanent Portfolio also has a cumulative IRR of around 6.5%, partly helped by the stronger US dollar. 

Going into the new year, I wish that my stock portfolio will continue outperforming the index and gives a long term average of 10-12% compounded annually.

Market crystal ball gazers Pt 2

In a post in Oct 2014, I noted down some of the predictions of some of people working in the finance industry for the rest of the year. So this post is to see how true their predictions are.

UOB Asset Management chief investment officer for equities and multi-assets, Mr John Doyle:
" Given the cyclical pickup in demand, we are overweight on the technology sector, which continues to benefit from rising corporate expenditure and the  IT upgrade cycle that has been suppressed so far due to prior uncertainties" -Re-read the sentence a few times and still don't quite understand what he means.

"Mr Doyle is most bullish on US stocks and neutral on Asian markets." S&P500 up 5% from 1967 to 2059, iShares MSCI All Country Asia ex Japan ETF remains at 16.

"Singapore market will likely remain range-bound in the quarter ahead" STI up ~3% from 3253 to 3365

OCBC Investment  Research head, Carmen Lee:
"As such, for the Singapore market,..., we expect the typical year end lull period to persist"

In addition, OCBC Bank economist Barnabas Gan gold price will drop further for the rest of the year while Mr Lim Say Boon, chief investment officer of group wealth management and private banking, believes gold "is likely to be trapped sideways over coming months" iShares Gold Trust (IAU) almost flat at end of 2014 at USD11.53.

For the fun of it, I'll give my take: Equities worldwide, especially the US market will suffer a drop and gold will rebound. I'll revisit these predictions towards the end of the year. I'm totally wrong.

So based on this post, will you put more trust in the professionals in their future predictions? I'll leave it up to you to decide.