5%+ Dividend Yield Portfolio: Beating The Market 2 Of The Last 3 Years (December 2018 Review)

Outlook 2018 was a tough year for investors with virtually all asset classes ending the year in the red. And ‘oh my’ was it ugly…

Source: Market Watch
Looking back at my 2018 prediction for calm and steady price appreciation for the first 3 quarters of the year followed by an increase in volatility in Q4 (driven by the midterms), it appears to have been pretty spot on. Of course, I thought that volatility would mean some choppy trading, not a 20% decline… so I’ll only award myself partial points for 2018. Of course, any predictions of specific price movements are meaningless since no one predictably knows where the market is headed over the short term (and hundreds of years of history show it going higher in the long term). So please ignore the MANY year-end articles currently being written that predict where the market is going in 2019. Of course, a few of them are bound to be correct, but this is best explained by the infinite monkey theorem of a monkey eventually typing the works of Shakespeare.
So just ignore the predictions and focus on making your portfolio more robust. If you are a long-term investor with a good investment strategy like me, think of making trades as tuning a sports car (tiny tweaks to make things better) rather than looking for dramatic miracle (which risks putting you in a ditch). I know that I certainly did some of this in 2018 as I sold off assets in the summer (when prices were high) and have been putting... Read more