Here's what I said last year:


A Dreadful year for this portfolio. In a year when the S&P500 returned about 5%, an evenly balanced portfolio of these 10 stocks lost about 10% even with dividends paid. T & KO were the only brights spots and HD, LTD and WM were positively horrible, all with losses of 30%+. Could 2008 be worse? Well the first week of trading is not too promising. I'll try this again in another post. Expect to see a lot of the laggards repeat.


Well, obviously the answer was, YES, 2008 actually could be worse. An equally balanced portfolio of my 10 stocks, with dividends, would have yielded around -37%, which is just about exactly the return of the S&P for 2008. Eliminating WM would have improved things a bit. JAS had a small gain by the end of the year, which was a much larger gain earlier in the year. AMAT had been up better than 20% at one point, as well. HD and PFE held up reasonably well, compared to the averages.