Portfolio Update: Half of the Year is Gone

Last November I was stuck with an exercised Put on the S&P 500 [SPY] which basically took me out of stock trading as directly after that the bottom fell out of the price of oil and thus the market. Just last week it had finally recovered and now I am able to sell options once again so I thought it was time to revisit each of my investments to see how they are doing.

1. Options - Not Bad

Honestly there isn't much to talk about here or anywhere for that matter, it has been a quiet 6 months. I was able to sell a few Calls through the first part of the year but the strike had to be so far out of the money that it didn't bring a whole lot home. Still something is better than nothing and my "safe" options method worked out with zero losses after the nose-dive that the market took. I did harvest some dividends which are always welcome but I am glad return to active trading.

2. Betterment - Also Not Bad and Won Some While Losing

With the drop in the market my Betterment holdings also took a hit and have been down for much of the year but recently have come back to a little more than 2% gain so far. The real story here is the Tax Loss Harvesting that occurred during the market drop. My rough estimate is that I'm going to make an additional 1% in tax savings from the Tax Loss Harvesting allowing Betterment to actually win while losing. It is one of the benefits that makes me have Betterment holdings instead of buying ETF/mutual funds myself and a great feeling to at least have something going your way when the markets take a dive.

3. Lending Club - Better than 5%

I've had my first loan default as the person filed bankruptcy. I have another loan that is well on its way to default. Even with all of that I'm still posting a 5% gain and the number of issued loans we have is starting to compound. I still consider Lending Club as a great external vehicle to the market and a worthy part of the portfolio.

4. Buy and Hold/Experiments - Mixed Bag

Not surprisingly the worst part of the portfolio currently is the speculation/experimentation that I had done in the last few years. I hold on to my losers in the unlikely chance that they will become winners (or even at this point). There are exceptions such as Walmart [WMT] who had the stuffing kicked out of them after January of 2015. That holding is almost even again but the rest (an extremely small portion of my portfolio) are likely to never recover. They are all learning experiences that have made me a smarter investor.

Bottom Line....

The bottom line is that my investments aren't doing bad. It hasn't been an exciting 2016 for me yet but I am obviously increasing my base and that pays off well when the market recovers. Options are now trading again and while I have yet to do a strict "numbers" crunch of everything I'm rather pleased with where we are. I've been through the alternatives of even riskier plays and had a downward market destroy a sizable portion of a portfolio. I'm really happy with how this portfolio handled the market going down. Now lets see how it does going up.