1. Yes it was. You timed the market. pure and simple. You are not a true index investor, even if you believe so. True index investors buy no matter what market and hold for the very long term. They are not concerned about 1 month or 1 year. You are. You are bragging about one years performance, when in the long run it doesn't matter as much. You are a market timer and the fact that you are up 90% versus the S&P up 50 some percent, tells me you are not a true indexer. There is much less difference between some of the clueless traders here and you, besides you have had some luck so far. 2. I am not saying you should wait 4 years and post your results. I'm saying you should not brag about one years performance, because it is lilliputian to the overall time frame of index investing. 3. Never said you would blow up. Index investors never will. But investing your money in one thing and having the exact same amount a decade later is what just happened to the majority of index investors. You have only been in the game for one year. That is NOTHING. Plenty of index investors were bragging about their returns in 2006 and 2007. Now where are they? "Maybe you could learn something from the tortoise and the hare story." The irony to this statement you just made is unbelievable. Read this next part closely You are bragging about less than one years performance. That is a very very VERY short time frame to an index investor. Maybe YOU could learn something from that. Be more humble and know you will not post huge returns forever. I am not a short term trader. Come back in 10-20 years and we'll see who made more money. One years time doesn't make a difference.
Wow your bragging about a weeks worth of gain! How many weeks are in a decade?? You are a trader in indexer's clothes. Also, I'm pretty sure the market wasn't up 10.4 percent this week. Not too sure how an indexer could crush the market in a week like you just supposedly did. Hey I won the lottery last week. I beat all the traders and crushed the market too!!!!!!!!!!
As I've stated elsewhere I don't blindly accept all the concepts generally attributed to index investing. such as: 1)now is always the best time to buy 2) Leverage has no place in a passive portfolio Why come back in 10-20 yrs for a comparison, we can do it now on an ongoing basis multi-year if you wish. Oh wait that means you would actually have to post your results, sorry silly me.
I'm sorry I can't post a loss just to make you feel better. Perhaps next week will be a different story, who knows?
OP, From the Summary, your total return since 9/25/08 was 109.50% where as the most aggressive 1 year Index return was DEE at 102.79% and you've been buying and hold since; I don't see how it's possible to outperform the best fund while you invested in them yourself. And if you are that good I'd suggest you to call up the funds to challenge them to a contest not on ET where we can't verify a piece of photo paper; it's not very easy to verify the results.
Piker, do you use products like SSO in your investing? How do you decide how much to allocate to SSO vs SPY? You still haven't shared any of your decision criteria actually.
Yes, I use leveraged funds. I won't be disclosing any more of my decision criteria than this (it's purely discretionary mostly determined by price). I will disclose when I move in/out of investments or cash but I will not be disclosing the specific fund or etf. Again I expect sales to be relatively rare, except for less risky investments viewed as a cash substitute. Sorry about that but if you are a legit trader ( as your posts indicate ) you will understand why.
9/25/08 was the account opening date, not the date of any purchase. As a matter of fact I clearly show that the account due to the insurance company screwing me over did not transfer the money to fund the account until11/14/08. Then there was a 5 day holding period since the bastards sent a physical check vs a wire transfer. hope this helps your confusion.
Well, you've proven yourself to be clueless. Those leveraged ETFs have no place in a long term portfolio. Do the math... I thought everyone in the world already knew this. Done with this thread... I'm sorry to see you have closed yourself off and decided to not learn. I suspect you had some bad experiences trading, but you are still trading. All you're doing is trading ETFs infrequently. Don't kid yourself. You haven't found a good method. (on the other hand, I do think 95% of ET posters are pretenders so you're better than them... but that's not the standard to be judged by.) And... whenever it happens... 6 months or 2years from now you take a big rip and realize your method isn't what you thought it was... remember you had a chance to learn here and passed it up. Please do the math and try to understand the leveraged products you're using. In the long run, they are mathematically guaranteed to underperform so you are guaranteeing you will lose. You're bringing volatility and risk into your portfolio with being compensated in the form of return. You've been really lucky but the past year has been about the best environment imaginable for what you have been doing. Kudos, but those of us who have been in the business for quite a bit longer than you realize the importance of having a ship that can weather all seas. You're not there yet so get off your pedestal and keep learning. -Talon PS BTW, the simple index add / drops method I posted far outperformed your returns over the same time period. Just so you know... and no i won't share my account statements with you. I realize the point of this thread is at least a little bit you were hoping to proven wrong... desperately looking for proof that someone can trade better than you did... I don't feel obligated to disclose details of my accounts to fulfill that purpose. Good luck.