Roth 2015

Last year I put my Roth 2014 contribution in to Vanguard’s Total International Stock Index, which wound up losing money. International stocks haven’t recovered as quickly as the US market, so last year I figured they were due, but instead the US continued to outperform the rest of the world. As I watched all of this unfold, I started to realize I was probably too heavily weighted in international stocks anyway. Still, in a market lull during October, I took a little money I had in a short-term bond fund (cash, essentially) and put it in Vanguard’s European Index. This went up about 10% almost immediately, but by December was back down to near where I bought it. I wound up selling it as well as my domestic small cap value fund to buy Vanguard’s Total Stock Market Index fund, which invests in the whole US stock market (instead of just the S&P 500 large caps). Some of that is too late because small caps dragged in 2014 as well, but now I have only two Vanguard investments: total US market and total foreign markets. So that’s everything! I still have more than I should in the international fund, so I am putting some of my 2015 contribution into the domestic fund.
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