MFA investment May 2025

Investing in math

"memomath" by Lizbeth*King is licensed under CC BY 2.0

(New subscribers: welcome! You may wish to go back and start with why I’m doing this and how to get started. You can also read a fair amount about investments we’ve made thus far.)

As of last week, the MFA portfolio is continuing to beat the S&P 500 by a comfortable margin in 2025: year-to-date we are up around 5.5% while the index is down about 1%.

That’s nice, but we didn’t start the portfolio in 2025. We started in January of 2024, and with the AI boom of 2024 that fueled massive returns in the stock market last year—which we chose to abstain from, for (hopefully) obvious reasons—we continue to lag the index hugely since inception.

We’re just getting started, so that currently means the portfolio is worth $2,624.30, whereas if that money had been invested in the S&P 500 (where, need I remind you, we would be the proud owners of infinitesimally small shares of Exxon Mobil, Chevron, Raytheon, Lockheed Martin, Northrup Grumman, and plenty of other things that should trouble your sleep) it would be worth $2,833.33. I’m okay with that gap.

Again, ethical retirement saving is the name of the game, not outperformance, but outperforming Big Oil, Big Pharma, and Big War Machine feels pretty great when it happens. And it does happen!

Over here in MFALand, we have been building our family’s little retirement savings, a few hundred dollars here and a few hundred dollars there, making modest investments into boring, solid, and ethically-tolerable public companies that make and sell stuff like sewage systems, greenhouses, tractors, dental supplies, infrastructure software, and infrastructure insurance.¹

We’re currently at 13 equities owned in the portfolio, which, depending on who you ask about diversification vs. concentration, is not enough, just right, or far too many. But we’re at a point where we can always ask ourselves each month if we are better off adding a new investment to the portfolio (further diversifying) or if we should instead put more money into something we already have that we think is the best candidate to increase the most in the future.

The effect of all this is to manually create our own (no-fees!) fund, which is the only way I have found to achieve some of the promises of the ESG “movement” [laughs weakly] without actually buying into it given that it seems to be more greenwashing BS than not.

Since 2024, the stock of one of the companies in the MFA portfolio has been pretty well demolished—down more than 43% since we bought two shares back in February 2024. This is evidently one of the worst investments we’ve ever made, which means it’s time for us to reexamine the reasoning behind buying it and decide if we should

• sit tight and do nothing,

• cut our losses, sell our two shares and realize a 43% loss but reinvest the money in something better, or

• buy more while it’s hella cheap and we can own more for cheaper (i.e., “invest in math”).

The company owns mission-critical real estate, has a solid balance sheet, is now paying a 7% dividend (one that has been growing steadily for the past 15 years) and, so far as I can tell, the stock price is down because of macroeconomic factors like interest rates and (not kidding) the ineptitude and incompetence of Donald Trump.

I’m buying more.

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