bad earnings season for me. First CAT and IBM and now today the absolute disaster DLR...down about $1500 today just on DLR.
Great work here. I agree that evolution of strategies is key, or at least incorporating different styles into your portfolio. I'd comment more here but I'm fairly busy these days and I don't turnover as much as you. I won't clutter your journal with my stuff but will add that I myself moved in my retirement account from a hard fundamental quantitative metrics approach (think net-nets and P/B <1 stuff) to looking at turnarounds/special situations and now tactical country allocation. I'm at ~60% since inception in early 2010 with much less volatility then the broader market. Keep plugging it at, there's not too many or any investing journals at all here.
Thanks for commenting! the comments are few and far between on here. Also thanks for talking about my turnover, that's something I've been very aware of lately and starting to think it's getting a little too high for what I am trying to accomplish - which is the main point of me saying I feel a shift in my strategy coming soon. Market seems pretty quiet right now so I will just do an update while I am here. Account balance: $71,067 For the month of October I was up 2.74%. This was over 7% until the DLR hit happened.. EDIT: I wanted to add the yearly number too which is now 33%. I was close to 40% before DLR I got absolutely clobbered by DLR this week. I added another 100 shares at 48.94 - which proved to be a little too early - but my cost basis is now down to 52.37. Overall I am in the hole $1600 on DLR right now...this is getting close to my biggest loser ever which was INTC. However with INTC they had a deteriorating business model and I ended up realizing the losses. I still have skin in the game with DLR and then the move in the market was way over done. I sold RDS-B right before earnings at the high point right before the 4.5% drop, I know cool story right? I will post blotter if anyone wants lol..the only problem is I took the proceeds to buy DLR..so while I save 4.5% on RDS-B I lost 3% on DLR so all in all it was a move that saved 1.5% on my money. I added more money to ARCP yesterday, I think ARCP is ridiculously cheap right now and should easily see 16-18 a share in the coming months. I still have a decent cash position, about 15% which is more than I normally like. Waiting to see a great buy
Was just going through some performance tabs and noticed October was the month I passed 100% cum perf since starting this in less than 3 years. I am very please with this result and the equity curve is actually pretty smooth. Hopefully the next 3 years can be the same. attached is screen shot blotter
Account balance: $73,630 Ive been active in my account but not on the forums. frustration is setting in. I got clobbered on DLR and then clobbered on CSCO a week or two later, they represent about 25% of my account combined.. I have been pretty active. I added KMI at a great price like 34.50 two days ago, I added UNP at like 153.30 and I added CVX at like 118.80 and I bought UTX very small position at 108.76 today. I plan to average into UTX if the market gives me a chance. I bought back my AFL puts yesterday for $1.07, I sold them about 3 weeks ago for $2 and they were set to expire in January so I liked that. I inteded to hold til expiration but I just can't get myself to hold when I got 50% of the money in 25% of the time. Today I am trying a new approach, I sold 2 KRFT jan 2015 puts @52.5 for $5.6. I like this because I sold these puts on margin and this gives me free leverage. I sell puts on margin up to 50% of account balance, this is not risky at all for me because I add fresh capital to the account every month. If I do get put the shares and I end up owning some shares on margin I will stop making buys and use the monthly contributions to pay down the margin. I would absolutely love to own KRFT for 46.9 in january 2015 if given the chance. I am okay holding these until expiration but given my track record if I get 50% or more gains on them in the next couple months I will likely close. My thought with going to jan 2015 is also I can do long term tax if I do hold until expiration. I am getting paid about 10% on my money to wait and see what happens to KRFT, which I consider fairly priced in today's market. I can't remember if I made a post but I sold my CAT shares at 84.50. Done holding that stock. I bought it a year ago for 86, made like 50 cents after dividends, the stock has been very disappointing. I actually bought CAT anticipating a strong rally in the market and thought CAT's beta would shoot it to the upside, that obviously did not pan out as the market did rally and CAT went no where fast. I am still outperforming the market on the year but the delta is growing less and less.
account value: $72,611 I am having a really rough quarter and it's been making me not want to post as much, go figure. Anyways. I am now up only 32.3% on the year and the SPY is up 29%... I already know that I will have worse out performance in a strong market so I guess I should not be too hard on myself. The biggest disappointment however is that somehow all my holdings have been in the perfect storm it seems like. The market continues to rage on and literally everything I own is getting the short end of the stick. CSCO tanked after earnings IBM tanked after earnings and then became a high profile short KMI I was doing really well in, then tanked 6% due to el paso dividend TGT had bad earnings report DLR...wow I don't even know where to start - by far my biggest holding and I honestly wish I wouldn't have gone so big, but hind sight is 20/20 and had it worked out differently I'm sure I wouldn't have thought twice about how big I am in it. PM was finally having some good weeks and then BOOM bad investors conference and got some down grades I will mention one interesting thing: Last week on the 29th of November I sold a CPB37 Jan2015 put for $2.90. This week CPB has had the biggest 3 day run in the last 10 or so years..off absolutely no news. I actually sold the put thinking the food sector could consolidate and thinking CPB could be a high takeover target for someone like warren buffet. The action in the stock and even more specifically the action in the option market yesterday in this stock..there's definitely something going on here. I am happy I have the position, but wish I would have sold more than 1 contract or even bought some common. I could not have timed that one any better, but alas it's a relatively small position for me. Still interesting that a takeover looks like 4 days after I went long thinking the sector would consolidate. Will be watching this one closely. In addition to the CPB I also bought GIS common at 50.32 and sold 2 KRFT52.5 Jan2015 puts for 5.6. Both of these for same reason as CPB, I see consolidation (m&a) in this sector on the horizon.
just realized I'm behind on some trade updates: on 10/31 I sold NSC @88.17..looks like this one will continue higher on 10/31 I sold KMB @107.51..this one shot up to about 111 and has been selling off ever since then, will pick up again around 95 if given the chance on 11/4 I added more DLR @48.94 and its continued straight down to 43..since bounced back. looking for 52 to get out of most if not all of this position. right now I have an overall cost basis of 52.30 on 11/4 I sold RDS-B for 73.11 which marked the high on the stock on 11/8 I bought UNP at 153.30, alrdy up 8% on this one on 11/8 I bought CVX @118.79, it's bounced around and I'm currently up a couple % on 11/12 I sold CAT @84.17 which I think I did update the journal on? on 11/18 I bought KMI @34.48, had a nice run in my favor right off the bat then it had a big drop, currently down about 3-4% on 11/20 I bought UTX @108.76, not much going on with this one at the moment, hoping it continues to hold the low end of its trendline on 11/22 I bought GIS @50.34, up a couple % on it so far. Right now I am building cash position and waiting...
well you'd think i was trading on insider information. the very next trading day the M&A in this sector has begun. sysco buys us foods. my krft puts jumped nicely today. watching closely as I own now CAG, GIS, CPB, KRFT all in hopes of more M&A
Account Balance: $77,050 Haven't been posting here because I've been unsure of what I want to do going forward. The puts I sold are obviously all doing quite nicely. Will have end of year %'s in a couple days when my broker updates. It is entirely possible I underperformed the market this year. I was over 10% ahead of the market around June and I slowly faded away. Mostly due to DLR but pretty much everything I did in the second half of the year went against me. I've been switching more defensively lately as my goal now is to do better then 1:1 on the downside. My goal was first to hit 100k between 401k and brokerage by my 28th birthday which will be september of 2014. However, I had a great first half of the year combined with a good market and I revised my goal to hit 100k by the end of this year. It was a super aggressive goal and I will fall short. In October I took another career opportunity with great upside but an initial 40% paycut. Without the 40% paycut I would have hit the 100k for sure. Total 401k + this account = roughly 95k Overall 2013 was a success but left a lot to be desired. Here's to a prosperous 2014. Will do another post in a couple days with percentages.