Nearly got caught up in the panic of the last few days, but haven’t sold anything yet, not for a gain, not for a loss.

I think avoiding realized losses is more important than making huge gains early in one’s trading/investing “career”. I’m going to preserve capital for as long as I can possibly take the emotional pain. (It wasn’t too bad, actually. I don’t check on stocks as often and feel pretty distanced from it all. Hey, it’s only money 🙂 )

Overall Canadian portfolio stands at ($2,089.95) for the year. Today’s Change: ($1,090.50) / -6.11%

Most of our stocks are listed on TSX-Venture. The exchange is down 2.32% today, which makes our portfolio beta* a scary 2.63! This is the price we pay for being greedy and not diversifying well enough.

For comparison, we also hold PG (Procter&Gamble) and its beta is somewhere around 0.25-0.5. The drawback is that jsut as the stock doesn’t move down much, it doesn’t move up much either! Please remind me why I even bothered with it.

Beta = a measure of a stock’s price volatility in relation to the rest of the market.