The Richardson Family

In 2015, I began seeing MF marketing pitches on various websites, and decided to research what they were about. In June 2015, I made my first investments according to their recommendations. On this page, I'll provide the results of following MF advice over the last 6 years.

The main things that attracted me to MF were their investing principles and their published track record. In particular, the tenant of holding investments for a minimum 5 years made sense to me, based upon my previous investing experience.

There have a been a few frustrating things with MF over this timeframe. The first 2 portfolios that I used for advice were closed after a year or so of me starting to follow them (MDP and PRO). Next, MF had a tool to help you monitor your portfolio performance which I used, but they discontinued it with just a 30-day notice. I suspect a lawyer was involved in that decision, but I had to scramble and move a lot of data manually into a spreadsheet. Over time, I've expanded the spreadsheet into a pretty sophisticated tool to meet my analytical needs.

So back to the portfolio performance. I originally bought 20 stocks in 2015 per MF recommendations. I still hold 16 of those. The other 4 were either merged or I got impatient with them. The 16 I still hold today have increased 348% collectively, while the S&P 500 has only doubled.

Since the performance of those initial recommendations were doing so well, I continued to buy additional stocks per MF recommendations routinely up to the date of this writing (May 2021). I've been investing for 40+ years, and diversification has become my mantra based upon lessons learned. Diversification and holding cash available to take advantage of downturns have helped me be a successful investor. In both 2008 and 2020, I had sizeable cash positions that allowed me to benefit during the downturns. Given that philosophy, deciding which MF porfolio(s) to mirror was perplexing to me. I finally decided that rather than taking sizable positions in 1 or 2 portfolios, to invest smaller amounts into a large number of portfolio recommendations, as a means of diversification.

I now hold 400 investments across 24 portfolios. There is a lot of redundancy of recommendations across MF portfoilos. I only buy a stock recommendation once, so I cant easily compare my performance against a specific MF portfolio to see how accurate it is. I'm essentally comparing performance against the MF universe of stocks at this point. Some might say I have a MF index fund (The MF 400) right now.

When I buy stocks per MF recommendations, I dont always invest the recommended allocation percentage eiher. Many times I'll only buy a taste just to have it a part of the portfolio. I just monitor percent gain/loss per individual investment and total portfolio (The MF 400). I compare my total portfolio performance to the S&P 500 over the same time period for my benchmark. My compounded annual growth rate (CAGR after deducting MF fees) has exceeded the S&P rate over my investment time period, so I feel I am achieving Alpha.

My total portfolio has doubled in value, and easily exceeding the performance of mutual funds and independent investments I was making previously. There have been so many MF recommendations that I had never heard of that have turned into big gainers for me. But there are a few losers too. Probably 20% of the recommendations either lose value or have very small returns. But the large gainers easily offset the losers.

I have noticed that many MF recomendations take a nose-dive shortly after their recommendation. So I've got used to buying a taste, then buying some more when it falls. When you plan to hold on to an investment for 5+ years, it makes that scenario more palatable. The MF also encourages you to continue to invest in your winners routinely. While I've done some of that, I've tended to invest more into their new recommendations. I've also got a bad habit of trying to buy losers as they fall. Sometimes they've bounced back and its worked out for me, and other times its made me look stupid. Sigh.

So that's my MF story so far. I'm a big proponent of MF. I'll update this page periodically with new info, so stay tuned.

(Page updated on 5/01/2021)