Baseline Portfolio Update: August 2010

On December 1, 2008 we created a baseline portfolio to measure the economy via a few stocks over the new administration. The stocks were chosen to represent large dividend yielding companies across the spectrum of markets.

The overall return in that year and a half plus is shown below:



















IBM, Dow and DuPont have done quite well. It is not clear what that says yet they have extraordinary performance. Verizon is in the tank, perhaps the flaps over broadband. J&J is stagnating, but better than bonds.

Here we show the returns over time:



















And we present an alternative view here:



















Clearly the gross return is there but the annualized returns have flattened or decreased over the past year or more.