What's the speed of my money?

Speed by Patrik Nygren

In my previous post "Reached 70k!" I mentioned that I’d broken 70k euros in my portfolio. I have set up a script that records the value of my portfolio every day so I decided to dig into my data a little bit.

I have previously not taken note of crossing these kind of milestones but I decided to do that in retrospect. I wanted to find out on which dates I have reached my previous 10ks. Here’s the data:

Portfolio value	1st occurrence
0	1.1.2011
10000	5.12.2011
20000	6.11.2012
30000	25.4.2013
30000 #2	2.5.2014
40000	3.11.2014
50000	22.1.2015
60000	4.11.2015
70000	27.5.2016

30k is listed twice because after I made it there the first time, I bought an apartment and took the down payment, around 10k euros from my portfolio. At that time in my life I also did some other purchases for the apartment. Getting back to 30k again took some time.

By the power of compounding, the accumulation of money should get faster. Did that happen? To some extent maybe yes but there’s not enough data to tell, really. 

Portfolio value	Days
0 to 10k	339
10k to 20k	337
20k to 1st 30k	170
1st 30k to 2nd 30k	371
1st 30k to 40k	541
2nd 30k to 40k	185
40k to 50k	80
50k to 60k	286
60k to 70k	205

The average addition of 10k took a little less than 250 calendar days (about 40 euros per day) but the data is quite sloppy. There's just too much variation to gain insights from these data, well, at least any extrapolation will be hard.

What jumps out from the data is 10k number 5, from 40k to 50k only took 80 days. Wowza! That was from the 3rd of November 2014 to the 22nd of January 2015. I tried to back track what had happened. The S&P 500 was basically flat during that time while the Finnish OMXH was up about 3.5%. I checked my contributions to the portfolio from that period and they were around 5k so another 5k came from my holdings. 

During that time I was holding a bunch of American equity ETFs and the EUR/USD exchange rate went from 1.250 on 16th of December to 1.147 on 22nd of January. This seemed to be magic ticket. Actually the next day, 23rd of January it was already at 1.1234 and my portfolio had made another 1000 euros. Unfortunately I can’t take credit for an exchange rate change and even more unfortunately it will also fluctuate in the other directions as times go by.