Here we are, the day of reckoning! First of all, I'm a bit surprised that currency is neglected in the topic again. Euro returns are quite a bit worse than dollar returns in 2020 due to all the money being printed by uncle Sam. When John (my condolences) says he is down 3% I assume that that is in EUR, which means a performance in dollar of about +6%. Quite a difference.
Anyway.
My after-tax net return is about ~5% in EUR or ~14% in USD. I don't really keep track of pre-tax / post-tax returns - I only manage my own money, I pay a flat wealth tax and my goal is to minimize after-tax returns so I include stuff like tax credits generated during the year in my portfolio performance. My ten year CAGR is now about 18.x% without a single down year.
My style can best be described as 'garbage sifting'. That's not really a style I expect to outperform with in a raging bull-market. And it didn't

. I'm reasonably happy with what happened in March: even though I was about fully invested (as I almost always am) and some special situations went bust my portfolio wasn't down a crazy amount and I could still sleep very well. Mostly I kept on doing what I always do. I'm not the guy who makes big calls, macro bets or bold 'recovery plays' or whatever.
What was very frustrating this year though (investing-wise - overall it was actually very satisfying) was having a one year old kid. Before the kid I used to work in the living room. Well, guess how that worked out early 2020. The shit hits the fan, markets are down 5% a day, country goes in lockdown, daycare closes, and both me and my wife try to work in the living room while a one year old is eating and destroying everything in sight. Good luck trying to analyze a mortgage REIT when your kid is obsessed by the blue power button on your computer. Biggest crisis of the decade but for me it was basically impossible to get into the right frame of mind and find the time to do some serious work. We ended up making a small office upstairs where we split our time. Still, we are again in lockdown now and again it is very hard to get serious work done. I've looked into hiring some office space during the year and maybe that's something I have to reconsider this year - especially given that there's another kid on the way.
This whole work-from-home situation led me to being frustrated and tired too often, which led to some unforced errors and sloppy due diligence. And I find that grating. I'm perfectly content with looking in the garbage can while others are up 500% with Tesla or whatever but at least I'd like to feel that I gave it my best effort and that wasn't always the case this year. So, overall I'm a bit salty. I need to find a better investing / life balance and if that doesn't happen during the next few years I will consider renting an office, outsourcing my investment work, putting it on hold or changing my style to be a bit more passive / low turnover. I like what I do and I'm confident that my approach to investing has its merits and a risk/return profile that I am content with so probably I will just go on but I'm keeping my options open. The end goal is to maximize happiness in life, not performance on the stock exchange. So far these goals have always more or less aligned for me as I love doing this but in 2020 that wasn't always the case.
Also, this is probably something for another topic but I didn't find this forum a particularly compelling / value-adding place to be in 2020. I find myself spending less and less time here and moved on to some other places. Maybe that's just me being a sore loser though in 2020! Thanks to thepupil for opening thousands of interesting real estate threads this year. Also, the GRIF thread was great, polite and worthwhile. You guys got me very close to buying but I never pulled the trigger. And a big shoutout to alwaysinvert for having lots of cool original Skandi ideas. Really happy with my Treasure ASA position this year and I think it has great prospects for 2021. Also a shoutout to Gregmal. Seems like he actually got more reasonable and nuanced here during a year in which a lot of people didn't. Didn't see that coming - that's probably me being fixed in my own ways. This just from the top of my head - please don't feel offended if you helped me in some way or another or posted cool stuff and I didn't mention you.
And finally a shoutout to all the people working in daycare. I seriously think I would have a burn-out within a week.
Onwards to 2021. Looking forward to it!