Marketimer Income Portfolio Performance

In the June 2013 "Hulbert Financial Digest,"  editor Mark Hulbert wrote an interesting articlecalled "The virtues of doing nothing" that said most of the advisors he follow would do better buying and holding! His incredible conclusion:  

"The bottom line?  The inescapable conclusions is that the average transaction that an advisor does is a mistake, at least in the sense that he would be better off if he hadn't undertaken it in the first place."

We may joke that Brinker's "Marketimer" newsletter model portfolios have been fully invested without an allocation change and very few model portfolio changes since March of 2003, but with Hulbert's data supports this idea.

Marketimer Income Portfolio:  Brinker tracks the performance of his three model portfolios, but I've never seen him show annual returns by year for his "Income Portfolio."  My guess is he doesn't want Mark Hulbert to count this against his overall performance since you give up return for safety.  Lets examine the performance of the Marketimer Income Portfolio so far this year.

Brinker Income Portfolio at start of year

Component Performance YTD for
Brinker Income Portfolio

Brinker may have made changes to what is in this portfolio since January, but using Hulbert's idea that of keeping it the same, the performance of the Marketimer Income Portfolio is currently down 2.4% YTD: 

Later on, I hope to do similar calculations for past years to get an idea of how well Brinker's "Income Portfolio" does against a benchmark like 10-yr Treasuries or Vanguard's Total Bond Fund (which is what John Bogle recommends.)

The good news is Brinker recommended very recently to several callers that if they were to only buy one fund, it would be Vanguard's Total Stock Market Index Fund, VTSMX.  The ETF for that fund is VTI which the chart above shows is doing very well this year.