Actually, that was my point. Even w/o time stops or opening new positions, his method has the potential to be extremely successful. But, yes, knowing how to manage your account could be tricky, i.e. # threads and, as you said, # new threads if you see him making more recommendations that "normal". But then that's a tricky issue for any trader. In addition, if he made less recommendations on an ongoing basis and a few of them had mediocre returns, it could be a captial killer...
One other assumption: the "Orig" spreadsheet has all trades possible, i.e. all recommendations from Mr. Market. If he has made other trades, I don't know about them and didn't take them into account...
What?!? Your honey isn't thrilled to see those hard-earned $$ pumped into equities? If only you'd bought her that new couch....
So then, you have now about 10 or so positions being held but not profitable. Assuming 14 total positions, your other 4 positions are profitable but haven't attained 15% so as to meet their target. Now you come up with a new opportunity, and so you pass on it, is what you're saying, because to take it you'd have to come up with new capital. You're saying that you only roll over capital, so you'd pass on it. Do I have that correct? Just to be even more clear, what you're saying is that starting with your first trade, you used 1/14 or so of your capital and rolled that over until the point where you either cashed out or were holding a losing position. Then you deployed the next portion with the next investment "stream", and so on. So it's taken you some period of time to fully deploy all your capital, is that right?
nope...the only reason I hold less than 14 stocks is that I like to space out my purchases so that I don't buy too many stocks at one time. This diversifies the risk of making too many purchases at a market top. Eventually I keep buying until my portfolio gets to 14 positions but if I keep selling (by having my stocks hit their 15 - 20% target) then the number of positions gets reduced. So it's kind of like a game of cat and mouse as the number of purchases I make keep up with the number of stocks I sell.
These are all of my buys in my Quantitatitive Momentum Portfolio and these are the only stocks I list on my website. Of course, I hold other "buy and die" stocks along with bonds, real estate, etc. and I also trade options and bet sports in a "gambling" account. These are not selected by my quantitative momentum model and really aren't interesting to discuss on my website, although if I see a football game I like or a long term "buy and die" stock that looks attractive, I will discuss it from time to time.
Okay, I see what you are saying about the 10 to 14 issues. I've att'd a workbook with a new spreadsheet that is called TenToFourteen. It shows how you have slowly ramped up your number of stock picks from 3 in early 2002 to 10 or so in early 2003. We could do an IRR pretty easily on p2003 and beyond, but I'm not sure I see the point as that is such a short time frame... So are your plans to keep 10 to 14 going? Do you feel that you will always be able to find 10 to 14 that meet your selection criterion?