REITs - Real Estate Investment Trusts - Info & Discussion: REITs vs Stocks 1972-2006

» Kirk - REITs vs Stocks 1972-2006

Over the long-term REITs (real estate investment trusts) have actually outperformed stocks. Investors appear to have caught on to this fact and have bid up REITs to new all-time highs. While today's chart illustrates that REITs are well within a long-term uptrend, REITs are fast approaching resistance (red line). Stay tuned...

<img src=http://www.chartoftheday.com/20060127.gif>

Since beating the market is hard for most to do, I recommend a "Core and Explore" approach to investing. Core means place 80 to 99% of your money into a CORE, buy-and-hold, no load, mutual fund portfolio and then EXPLORE with the remainder. To build your core portfolio, I suggest a diversified basket of index funds such as one of the two Vanguard index fund portfolios I recommend in "Kirk's Newsletter ." For the remainder, I recommend Kirk's Newsletter Explore Portfolio . Through Jan 1, 2006, these two core portfolios, composed of seven different Vanguard Index funds, have beaten the S&P500 over the past five and seven years by over 20% using no market timing and only rebalancing once a year. These index fund portfolios include US equities, international equities and an REIT index fund.

As of 12/31/05 the Total Return for "Kirk's Newsletter Explore Portfolio" since 12/31/98 is Up 197% while the S&P500 only up 12%!!! & NASDAQ only up 1%!!! (my explore portfolio beta is about 1.5.)

-- posted by Kirk