Investment Update - January 2025

This is our monthly update on the family fund’s investment performance for January 2025. It highlights this month’s changes, with a full month-over-month trend analysis coming soon as a separate page.

This first update is longer than usual, as it explains the “why” and “how” behind it.

Why writing this update

For years, we’ve casually traded stocks with our family fund, like typical retail traders. Honestly, we’re not great at it—our results just follow the market, and we’ve only tracked them through tax returns. Still, managing our money well matters to us.

We think regular updates will:

• Show how our money’s doing (it’s not a lot, but it matters to us)
• Sharpen our trading skills by reviewing changes and trades
• Keep us focused on this as a family priority
• May spark helpful online feedback

What does the update include

Our fund mixes 401(k) contributions—a U.S. employer-sponsored retirement plan with pre-tax, tax-deferred growth—and after-tax money once the 401(k) is maxed out. Our 401(k) is mostly in retirement fund and US market index fund. With after-tax funds, we trade individual stocks, index funds, crypto, and also use robo-investing for a part of it (automated, low-fee portfolio management). We’re curious to compare robo-investing’s results to our manual investment.

We report normalized values, with the starting point of total value being 100 (as of 01/01/2025), not actual dollars, for privacy reasons.

We’re shifting from heavy individual stock holdings to mostly U.S. index funds for long-term growth and low fees. We’ll keep some stocks for long-term gains and a small chunk for short-term trading. The updates won’t detail these breakdowns until they stabilize—numbers jump too much otherwise, making updates meaningless.

In this first update, we report the value change and growth of the total asset and some high level breakdowns. We will add more in the future update.

January update

Overall, January is a good month. The total value grows to 104.85 by the end of the month. After tax portion grows slightly higher than 401(k), largely because the stock market outperforms in January. Below is the detailed growth rate: