I’ve never liked doing all the calculations required to figure out the performance of my Jubak’s Picks portfolio. Frankly, figuring out the exact gains in positions that have, because of history, come to have radically different numbers of shares and then adding in dividends that change from quarter to quarter is really, really boring. At times in the almost 20 years that I’ve tracked my picks in this portfolio I’ve fallen very behind in this important part of my work here.

But I’ve never fallen quite so far behind as I have recently. And now I’m going to make a crash effort to get up to date. This post will bring me current through the end of 2014. And over the weekend I’ll bring these figures up through the end of 2015. That should let me tackle the first and second quarters of 2016 in the early part of the week.

I’ve had an excuse for my sloth and neglect. Because of a quirk in the way that the original Jubak Picks page was built, changing the performance number in the banner at the top of the page was extremely difficult–indeed impossible without the intervention of the original graphic artist who designed the page. I’ve used that difficulty to avoid a task I disliked. My bad.

With the redesign/refresh of that Jubak Picks page that we hope to roll out this weekend, making that change becomes much easier and my excuse becomes even more lame than it was.

So here’s a quick overview of 2014 in an effort to get up to date.

For the calendar year the portfolio showed a total return of 4.91%. That badly trailed the 13.52% total return on the S&P 500 for the year.

The portfolio started out the year well with a 13.34% total return in the first quarter of 2014, but then lost 3.49% in the second quarter and another 5.56% in the third quarter before limping home with a 1.56% total return in the fourth quarter.

The portfolio finished the year with 7.23% of its assets in cash. That was down from 13.16% in cash at the end of the September quarter but about even with the 7.4% cash in the June quarter.

For the life of the portfolio, which now stretches back to May 1997, the total return was 445% as of the end of 2014. That compares to a total return of 238% for the S&P 500 during that period. Both total return calculations include reinvested dividends. (S&P calculation from Don’t Quit Your Day Job dqydj.com. If you don’t know that site’s many calculators, you certainly should check it out.)