Q4 2025 Review
Reviewing the portfolio and checking in on my goals
10 Goal Check-in
For a full description please refer back to my Looking Forward to 2025 Post
- Maintain investing savings rate of 33% ❌
- My contributions divided by my gross pay is currently 31.93%. Halfway through the year was propped up by tax returns even though I had a large
- Open spousal RRSP ✅
- 🎉this is big for us as it makes sense mathematically and even more importantly makes my partner happy!
- 50 blog posts. ✅
- Nailed it with 1 to spare
- 25 long form videos on YouTube. Or essentially 2 a month. ✅
- 26/25 videos.
- 50 short videos ❌
- As predicted all year this was an utter failure without any attempt made on short videos. I may make some in 2026 but I dont think I’ll set a goal for it.
- Negotiate our bundled home and car insurance. ✅
- Negotiated with our current broker upped the deductible slightly as well, unfortunately rates are way higher for everyone this year.
- Negotiate our mortgage renewal. ✅
- Signed on for a 5 year fixed interest rate got a match and a beat with our current broker and am very happy with that
- 150 30 minute workouts. ❌
- 80 recorded sessions was my final number honestly pretty pathetic will aim to do better in 2026 by use of the Better Me app.
- Improve on the blog. ❌
- Blog remains unchanged in terms of functionality and design
- Introduce quarterly check-in posts with videos seeing how closely I am tracking my goals set for the year. ✅
- Fourth check-in complete 🎉
Stats
| Symbol | Count | Description |
|---|---|---|
| ❌ | 4 | Little to no progress |
| 📈 | 0 | Making solid progress |
| ✅ | 6 | Complete |
Portfolio Performance Review
Final quarter of the year has us as follows:
- Value wise my portfolio ended up 41.21% YTD (calculated with Jan 1st 2025 to Jan 12th 2026)
- Removing deposits we were 23.53%
- By comparison:
- Nasdaq is up 20.54%
- S&P is up 16.65%
- TSX is up 24.73%
One big callout is that a significant portion of my portfolio is in USD and for these quarterly performance calculations I like to convert the USD to CAD. For the day to day or week to week I usually leave the conversion out for simplicity.
- At the start of the year my recorded conversion rate was 1.4407 and today for end of Q4 it is 1.3899
Full Year
| Category | Q1 | Q2 | Q3 | Full Year |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Portfolio With Deposits | -1.69% | 14.12% | 25.19% | 41.21% |
| Portfolio without Deposits | -10.43% | 11.36% | 22.51% | 23.53% |
| Nasdaq | -13.26% | 8.62% | 18.22% | 20.54% |
| S&P 500 | -8.61% | 6.67% | 14.48% | 16.65% |
| TSX 60 | -4.96% | 7.64% | 20.65% | 24.73% |
Wrap Up
Well 2025 has come and passed us by our year ended with the biggest surprise of the year, no not in the stock market but, in the birth of our firstborn child. My wife and I are beyond excited and have been learning what it means to be parents and the time that is required to succeed. I definitely now understand the meaning of you sleep when the baby sleeps. I just wished the baby would sleep for more than a few hours at a time. With this being said I will be scaling back both posts and videos as mentioned 2 weeks back in Looking Forward to 2026 Post
Portfolio wise I am quite happy with our performance this year. The fact that both the S&P 500 was beat by the TSX 60 as well as the straight S&P 500 index funds being beat by their 25% leveraged covered call counter parts is wild. Those two facts were what allowed my portfolio to beat the index as well. Not too mention that we beat the Nasdaq 100 as well. It was a year full of big market swings and luckily I took part in a few swings myself.
Moving forward I will continue to simplify the majority of my holdings into indices and invest small amounts into higher conviction plays.
Thanks for stopping by and I hope the holiday season treated you well.
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- Subscribing to my YouTube Channel
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- Simply continuing to read my weekly posts here.
Cheers ☕