White Trash on Wall Street

It's time for our monthly review of the White Trash and Minor Vices portfolio.

To refresh your memory, in late March we set up a model portfolio of the following stocks, and have been tracking its performance against major indexes on a periodic basis:

• BFB - Brown-Forman Corp. Cl B
  
• BUD - Anheuser-Busch Cos. Inc.
  
• CHB - Champion Enterprises Inc.
  
• F - Ford Motor Co.
• GM - General Motors Corp.
  
• IGT - International Game Technology
  
• KO - Coca-Cola Co.
• KFT - Kraft Foods (not part of original portfolio; spun off by Altria, but it clearly still belongs)
  
• MCD - McDonald's Corp.
  
• MO - Altria Group Inc.
  
• WMT - Wal-Mart Stores Inc.

With some effort, we pried ourselves away from the news about Britney Spears' latest struggle with mean radio station advertisers to note, with pleasure, that since inception, the White Trash Portfolio has returned a healthy 8.7% on initial investment.

Over the same time period, exchange-traded funds (ETFs) tracking the major indexes performed as follows:

• DIA, which tracks the Dow Jones Industrial Average, is up 9.7%
• SPY, which tracks the S&P 500, is up 7.2%.
• VTI, which tracks the performance of the broad US stock market as a whole, is up 7.4%
• IYC, which tracks the Dow Jones Consumer Cyclical index, is up 3.4%.