August 7th, 2006 at 4:16 pm

What if we bought Ben Stein’s Portfolio?

in: Portfolio Smackdown

Ben Stein has a column at Yahoo! Finance and last October he detailed a portfolio of 9 Exchange Traded Funds (ETFs) in one entitled A Model Portfolio for Weathering Retirement.

So if we would have bought it for our Portfolio Smackdown instead of the ones I picked, how would we have done so far?

Up a whopping 8.4% as of close of trading Monday, 7 August 2006. Not bad Ben!

Ben Stein’s Portfolio
Name
Ticker
_Price_Paid_
Shrs
Buy_Price
LatestPrice
%Gain
Total_Value
S&P DEP RECEIPTS
SPY
$ 30,000.00
240.94
$ 124.51
$ 127.95
2.8%
$ 30,829.92
DIAMONDS TRUST SER 1
DIA
$ 10,000.00
94.59
$ 105.72
$ 112.34
6.3%
$ 10,627.47
VANGUARD SM-CAP VAL
VBR
$ 15,000.00
247.32
$ 60.65
$ 64.73
6.7%
$ 16,009.11
iShares EAFE
EFA
$ 15,000.00
252.40
$ 59.43
$ 65.71
10.6%
$ 16,585.06
iShares Emerging Mkts
EEM
$ 10,000.00
113.31
$ 88.25
$ 95.30
8.0%
$ 10,798.87
ISHARES GS NAT RES
IGE
$ 5,000.00
56.61
$ 88.33
$ 101.45
14.9%
$ 5,743.24
ISHARE MSCI CANADA
EWC
$ 5,000.00
228.31
$ 21.90
$ 24.11
10.1%
$ 5,504.57
iShares REIT
ICF
$ 10,000.00
133.62
$ 74.84
$ 88.14
17.8%
$ 11,778.42
Cash / Dividends
$ 595.51
$ 100,000.00
8.4%
$ 108,408.16
2
  • 1

    Are you sure about VBRs price on 12/29/05? I bought VBR about a month later, 2/2/06, and it’s down 3.7%

    kate on August 10th, 2006
  • 2

    Yes, don’t you remember January? It was one teriffic month. finance.yahoo.com has historical prices. And in fact, I did get it wrong, but it should be $60.69.

    Thanks for checking up on me though.

    According to Yahoo, you bought it between 64.27 and 65.15 and today it closed at 64.019. Doesn’t seem like it should be down that much.

    Paul Douglas Boyer on August 10th, 2006

You must be logged in to post a comment.