Excluding dividends, my portfolio of local stocks was down by 1.81%. My portfolio had underperformed the overall market in the month of September 2014. However, the performance was adjusted lower to a negative of 1.18% after taking dividends into account. Ever since I started tracking its performance from the start of 2010, my holding period returns had translated to 9.67% in annualized return. It was another month of further consolidations for my local portfolio. I boosted my cash level by selling off a couple of stocks. Currently, my local portfolio is made up of majority in reits and some growth stocks in sectors of small to middle capitalizations. A lot of investors or traders are wary of the negative impact of rising interest rates on highly leveraged stocks like reits. Most of them have short term memory or have never looked at history before. The period of ...