If I recall correctly. I was around 1/3 cash, 1/3 gold, 1/3 long term treasuries, leading into the march 2020. I had sold all of my stocks in 2019, I thought they were bubbly. I missed a run up but I also missed the crash.

Not nothing, this post is at 286 karma and trending up!

Exactly. Kind of a waste of time. The reason I dislike the SP500 is it gets growth stock weighted with crap I dislike like Facebook and Tesla. In 2020, something like 40% of the SP500 was in Apple, Google, Amazon, Facebook, Microsoft, and Tesla.

What would really improve my gains is if I can marry a speaker of the House of Representatives.

The wsb way

Taxes were fine, most of my trading was in retirement accounts and my taxable accounts I use tax loss harvesting.

It’s a hobby and fun for me, to read news and do macro analysis. Also, now that I’m more confident in my analysis, I can go heavier into sectors I see greatest potential in. Had I position sized higher on my plays, I’d be beating the market by quite a bit.

In a way, it’s saving me money that I might have to spend on a hobby.

On the bright side I dramatically reduced my volatility. I didn’t post it but if you look at nasdaq versus my portfolio, they also ended the same but nasdaqs delta to my performance was even higher, it shot up rapidly and then crashed down. low volatility is preferred since if I need to draw down the portfolio at some point there is less risk of drawing down from a crash/bottom.

It’s not really codifiable or objective. I look at what’s happening in the world and think about where money will flow.

In early 2020 I was in line at the post office, wearing a mask when that nonsense started, and an old man had ridden his bicycle here. He said the gyms being closed made it hard to work out so he was biking more. I immediately thought “peloton will soar on these lockdowns” because I KNEW lockdowns would last 18 to 24 months.

But I didn’t buy any, the stock seemed expensive. Oops.

By late 2020 I saw the ‘vid was entrenched and knew it would be a massive recession. And the government would propose infrastructure spending. So I went heavy into infrastructure stocks while everyone else was piling into tech.

Late 2021 I said war was going to be a way for the politicians to divert inflation so I went into defense contractors.

Mid-2022 I saw green energy policies in Europe complained with anti-Putin pro-Ukraine rhetoric would mean high energy costs there and shortages. So I sold the few European stocks I had, and I bought into uranium since nuclear is the only way out for them.

Nord pipeline blew up and I knew the oil had to be transported in tankers so I bought tankers.

I look to see what’s happening in the world. And IF the stocks are cheap enough to buy, I’ll buy. I missed on peloton because it looked expensive. I missed on Zoom because I work in IT and have known for years Zoom is trash spyware and had no idea it would go so fucking high.

If you study history and psychology you can see where the world is going. And try to front run investments. If you only invest when the macro picture looks possible and the stocks are value, then even if the macro is wrong, you bought into value so it wasn’t that bad.

Value being something that’s under 12x earnings (PE) versus growth that’s like Tesla that was 900 PE last year. I don’t like growth stocks because if you’re wrong, you’re spectacularly wrong. Look at early to mid 2022 what happened to Ark innovation stocks. But if wrong on deep value stocks, they’re still deep value.

PBR, VALE, ABEV are great value stocks with good dividends that will outperform if not nationalized By Brazil’s new president. Position size appropriately that if they drop to zero you‘ll be able to stomach the loss. PBR is trading at 2x earnings.

I think there’s rules against tickers of sub $1B companies but there’s only two publicly traded firearms companies in the US, they are market cap around 700M. They’ve been hit hard in the last few months. I loaded up on more.

WBA Walgreens looks cheap And nice diversifier from my otherwise commodity producers.

I’m keeping an eye on Kohls KSS because it looks cheap but has run up a bunch lately so I’d like to be a pull back. It may not happen and I may miss it but I am okay missing stuff. I want to buy $1 for to cents, rather than buy $1 for $2 and hope it goes to $3.

From a macro level, shoppers will be forced to downgrade. Target shoppers go to Walmart. And I think Kohls is a lower tier kind of place in the middle class realm. I can see new shoppers downgrading from something better down to kohls. Also there’s the bullwhip effect and I think lots of apparel and home goods places are overstocked. So they might offload stuff to kohls cheaper than usual.

I really like gold miners like GDXJ but it’s run up 30% in recent weeks so it’s tough to say it’s as good of a deal as when I got in, but I think 2x or 3x over a year is possible. If the fed pivots, GDXJ could soar. Gold is at 1750 now. It was over $2000 in early 2020 before we got 30% debasement of the dollar supply. It *should* be $3,000 an ounce now. Gold miners are a leveraged play in that if gold doubles, then miners might 5x or 10x. But it works both ways if gold goes down.

Miners use diesel as input cost so being long oil stocks is a good internal hedge.

Speaking of oil. I loaded up on tanker stocks when the pipeline magically exploded and they’re up 40% in a couple months. FRO is my fav but it’s run up a bit so Id wait to see if it drops down back to 10 before entering.

DVA Davita dialysis company. Buffet owns 40%. It crashed last month on bad earnings due. Everytime that happens, buffet buys more. I loaded up. Get in around the 70 mark and hold for 6 months, will be at 80+ which will be like 20% annualized returns. the stock has a “buffet put” where it can’t fall too low or he will buy more.

It distracts the populace and gives them a fall guy. Justifies increases money printing/spending by government. It doesn’t actually fix the inflation, it fixes the perception of inflation.

I am long commodity producers, gold miners, and some deep value stocks. I have quite a bit of shorts. Short Tesla, QQQ, Amazon, Meta, SEDG, and a few home builders.

Hindsight of 2020 is 20/20

what do you spend your time doing instead? Posting on WSB about how much time you save by not trading?

Nope I managed it with tax loss harvesting. Had like $30k of carry forward losses in 2020. used them in 2021. And now this year I have like $30k of taxable gains. But that’s Tesla shorts that I had to close out this year anyway. So not really a way to short Tesla and avoid short term gains,

Reducing volatility is a good thing. I’d rather have a tighter spread up and down than wild swings all else equal if the end balance is the same.

Yes on approach changes. Historically, I’d have an idea and not go deep enough. example, in November 2021, I thought “the main way out of inflation is war“ so let me invest in defense contractors. I proceeded to put like 5% of my portfolio into them. Made like a 30% gain in a few months when ukraine kicked off. But barely a dent to overall portfolio.

Did the same with infrastructure stocks. Only put like 10% of my portfolio in it. And those positions 2x to 3x over a year.

So when I saw gold miners were cheap a few months ago, I put 25% of my portfolio into them. And did gradually pare some gains in the way up. Still around 15% of my portfolio now.

So my change in approach is to go deeper into my macro plays.

Fuck it, I’m going to put it all on 0DTEs tomorrow! j/k

Yeah I’m kind of buy and hold. But not like 30 years; more like, oh look, gold miners are cheap, let me buy $100k, and now I have a $30k gain on them over a few months but I don’t want to sell, and incur short term cap gains in 2022. And I think they could still double from here so I’m holding them for the long-term cap gains tax to kick in.

I do more macro based analysis and hold until the macro environment changes. I bought $100k of infrastructure stocks in late 2020 anticipating a congressional bailout around spending. I sat in them for 4 months doing nothing while tech tripled. And then tech crashed and my play paid off, but I sold, wasn’t the time to hold infrastructure stocks anymore.

I think WSBers who get older will like my strategy. I’m not buy an index fund and sit for 30 years but I’m not buying 0DTE options either. I do something in the middle.

If I just bought an index fund, I could have saved enough time over the last three years to learn a foreign language or more likely, to masturbate thousands of more times.

For those wondering I sold most of my stocks in early 2020 and was heavy into gold and long term treasury bonds so I did great during the march 2020 crash. And I started buying back into stocks, but not much because I thought things would go much lower. So the SP500 shot up while I stayed flat. By early 2022 I sold off all my bonds and moved heavily into commodity producers which seems to have kind of tied the SP500 for 2022 over the course of the year.

Made some shit plays like lost $30k in Redfin and Zillow, but made it up by shorting Tesla, so the yolo plays were not too productive on net. Made maybe $20k profit on yolo shit. Which really just helped me compensate for the lack of tech stocks in my portfolio since I thought they were in a bubble for 3 years and avoided them.

Oh and I had/have $40k of Russian equities that vaporized to near zero. I expect they’ll be unfrozen eventually and turn into $150k+ overnight.