Special Situations Real Money Portfolio 2005 Performance

It’s hard to believe that the Special Situations Real Money Portfolio (AKA my son’s Coverdell Education Savings Account) has completed it’s first full calendar year. I’ve had some time this weekend to look over all the transactions that have occurred. It has been a pretty interesting year for going private transactions. Even a few of the transactions blowing up, I still had market beating performance with these low risk risk arbitrage transactions.

There was no lack of great opportunities this year, but my son’s Coverdell ESA did lack funds many times to take advantage of the full range of opportunities. I look forward to adding another $2,000 dollars to that account in the next few weeks now that a new year has started.

Let me update you on what has happened so far in my real money portfolio. The detailed transactions are listed in the table below. Each transaction in the table is linked back to the post that discussed that purchase, sale, or cashout.

Closing the year out, my positions at the close of the market on December 30, 2005 are as follows:

Holdings on December 31, 2005

As you can see, my recent additions include JB Oxford and Refocus Group. There is a problem with the cash out of my Refocus Group shares, but I am hopeful that Firstrade will resolve it soon. For now, I am using the $0.27 value per share that is listed on my account summary page. That value may go up or down depending on how this issue gets resolved.

The JB Oxford’s going private transaction was completed on January 4, 2005. However, since I’m doing this update for the 2005 calendar year, I used the closing price of $1.72 for December 30, 2005 instead of the cashout value.

Now that I’ve gone through all the transactions and my current account balance, let me take a look at my performance. I have invested $4,000 in this account and I am up a total of $519.58. That’s almost a 13 percent gain on my investment. The internal rate of return since this portfolio was first funded on October 19, 2004 is by my calculation 12.1 percent APY. For the 2005 calendar year, my performance was 8.4 percent APY. That is almost double the 4.91 percent return for the S&P 500 for 2005.

I was bit surpised at the performance of the Special Situations Real Money Portfolio. Given the losses that Central Federal Corp. caused, I didn’t think that I would beat the S&P 500 index this year. Hopefully when the Fed stops raising interest rates, Central Federal Corp. will recover a bit so I can close out that position.

I look forward to the increased flexibility that I will have in this account in 2006. There were several opportunities that I couldn’t participate in due to a lack of funds. If you are interested in current going private transaction opportunities, consider contributing to Fat Pitch Financials to gain access to my exclusive daily updated detailed summary of current going private transactions.