PERFORMANCE
*****
*****
GENERAL THOUGHTS
And I'm posting this March "update" on 8 April as well. Another impressive month of losing money while the market was up.
That said, I think I've given up on trying to do macro stuff. That is outside my wheelhouse and I've realized how much work and trading it takes to get right. It's not as simple as buying Treasuries or Gold or "insert ticker" and then holding it for a while. It takes trading.
I'd much rather just buy stocks of companies. And then protect my downside by using a trend following strategy. That's the conclusion I've come to as of now.
The past few months I've also tried out various things on trend following and the stuff I came up with was way too complicated. That's partly why my portfolio is down. I over-complicated it.
Where I'm at today is simply using an EMA 5-7 Cross for the short-term trend combined with an EMA 65 for the long-term trend. It's way simpler. It causes me to get chopped up and lose money on short-term trades, but once a trend gets going it should make up for the losses. That's the idea at least.
I don't want to spend a lot of time on trading, and I don't want it to be qualitative. I want it to be purely quantitative and unemotional. The qualitative part of my investing will be finding the companies. I'm looking to invest in the best companies, not the best stocks. The trend following is supposed to protect the stocks from the macro (and also check my ego if I pick a bad company but am convinced it's a good pick).
Anyway, I'm hoping that I've come full circle on this. So far I was correct in that November 2022 was the bottom for most of my stocks, and I bailed out at the bottom. That was capitulation on my part. But I needed to get shaken out to stop and do some introspective thinking. That was about five months ago now. Pretty crazy to think that the bottom was five months ago yet my portfolio has continued to fall, albeit modestly.
Anyway, let's see how it goes from here.
Below was my portfolio at the end of March. It will change from here, but will resemble how it was last year. In other words, it'll be a concentrated portfolio of high growth companies. The only difference will be that I will use a trend following strategy. So I'll have a list of targeted holdings, and then based on the trend of each stock it will either be a 0% or full allocation.
I'll publish my targeted portfolio starting next month along with the current allocations. It'll be pretty simple.
I might also short a correlated index depending on the overall trend of the portfolio but we'll see how it evolves.
PORTFOLIO
76% CASH
