Last year I was debating about whether to put my 2006 Roth IRA contribution into one of three Vanguard funds: Total International Stock Market Index (VGTSX), S&P 500 Growth Index (VIGRX), or the FTSE Social Index (VFTSX). I ruled out the international fund because 2005 had been such a good year and I didn’t think it could hold up. That led me to the latter two and I chose FTSE because it was pretty close to the S&P 500 index, but also had a social conscience. As it turns out FTSE outperformed the growth index, getting an 13% gain vs. 9% for the growth index while the S&P 500 was just under 16%. But the international index blew them all away, with a 26% return in 2006. Meanwhile the small cap value index that I had contributed to the previous two years did pretty well again with a 19% return.
Year: 2007
Fourth Quarter Results
Happy New Year!
This is a special edition of quarterly results because it also marks the end of the year. At the end of each year I reset my web site’s counter. Last year I had 159,227 visitors to my website compared to 81,763 the previous year, almost double. Some of that was due to the big peak in June and July when the battery pack was mentioned on Make, Digg, and Hackaday. After that traffic leveled out to about 400 hits per day, higher than the 300 or so a day I had been getting before that.