Bricks & Mortar Portfolio: The Half-Year Mark

This column originally posted on RealMoney.com at 6:59 a.m. EDT. For more information about subscribing to RealMoney, please click here.

The recent action in the stock market reminds me of the storyline of Don DeLillo's classic White Noise. In that novel, an airborne toxic event unleashes a lethal black chemical cloud that floats over a small city in Middle America, forcing residents to evacuate their homes to prevent acquiring the resultant disease.

These days, the toxic cloud that's spreading on Wall Street is a brutal bear market in equities. Investors are fearfully fleeing their stock portfolios. The market's industrial accident has been a mix of several violent incidents: the unwinding of the credit crisis, a terribly battered U.S. housing market and skyrocketing oil prices.

My Bricks and Mortar mock portfolio has not been immune to this carnage, but it has outperformed the S&P 500 thus far this year. The long-short mock portfolio was down 2.1% year to date as of Tuesday's market close, compared with a 12.5% decline in the S&P 500 and a 5.6% drop in the U.S. MSCI REIT Index. ...