Posts from the ‘Portfolio’ Category

Jan 6

Week 79: From Chaos to Order

Portfolio Performance

Summary

I am going to try to keep to a shorter update but given my track record with brevity we will see how that pans out. The reason I want to keep it brief is that I am attempting to write a Visual Basic program this weekend that will allow me to paste my transactions into an excel spreadsheet and automatically spit out a list of the closed positions, the open positions, and the relevant transaction parameters. I want a better solution than a snapshot of the RBC Practice Account portfolio holdings page; I have no ability to come up with graphs and charts of performance with my current snipit method, the practice account summary has a bug that screws up the book value and gain/loss numbers every time you make a partial sale of a position, which is a real pain, and I want to be able to post a consolidated list of all my closed positions along with their gain and loss, something that is not possible from the practice account (my current method, which has been to post every one of my updates on my portfolio page, is getting to be a little too long).

On the Cliff

The market was a real yo-yo over the last couple weeks but I didn’t really panic much. I have been known to do violent purges in the midst of chaos, but not this time. I was pretty confident that something would get done, either at the deadline or as a result of the steep fall that would occur after it was passed. As it was, things turned out just about in-line with my expectations. Read more

Nov 27

3 Comments

Week 73: A short update

Portfolio Performance

(Note that I am now posting my portfolio composition and list of trades at the end of the post)

Update

This is going to be a short update. I wanted to get this out over the weekend but did not have time. The performance snap-shot is as of last Friday, so it does not include the rather impressive moves that occurred yesterday in Impac Mortgage (IMH), Nam Tai (NTE) and Equal Energy (EQU). To just briefly touch on what happened yesterday, a fund named Iszo Capital announced a 6.2% position in Impac Mortgage after the market closed yesterday. As for Nam Tai, the company released a video on their website that suggested sales could hit $300 billion per month in the future. This would be quite the jump from current levels, as the company did $380 million in sales in the third quarter. Read more

Oct 15

Week 67: Sitting Tight

Portfolio Performance

Volatility

I always have a volatile portfolio. I don’t think that there is any way to outperform the market and not be volatile. If there is I haven’t found it.

Two weeks ago it soared up 6%. Last week i gave back all of those gains.

Volatility is just something I have learned to live with. The important thing is not to let it shake you out of your positions prematurely. When you get skyrocketing stocks like Nationstar or Impac Mortgage they are bound to have fast and sharp corrections. What I have to try to do, and what can be very difficult to do, is to divorce myself from the immediate price movement and simply ask myself the question of whether the story is intact and whether the value is reflected.

I am reminded of the following excerpt from Reminiscences of a Stock Operator:

I think it was a long step forward in my trading education when I realized at last that when old Mr. Partridge kept on telling other customers, “Well, you know this is a bull market!” he really meant to tell them that the big money was not in the individual fluctuations but in the main movements that is, not in reading the tape but in sizing up the entire market and its trend. The market does not beat them. They beat themselves, because though they have brains they cannot sit tight. Old Turkey was dead right in doing and saying what he did. He had not only the courage of his convictions but also the intelligence and patience to sit tight. Disregarding the big swing and trying to jump in and out was fatal to me. Nobody can catch all the fluctuations. In a bull market the game is to buy and hold until you believe the bull market is near its end.

Oct 1

Week 65: Doing the work

Portfolio Performance

The turn in housing

– Michael Burry – Scion Capital

The housing market has turned.

Being that it is a huge, lumbering tanker, it takes a long time to slow down and redirect. The changes happen slowly enough that you can miss them if you are focused on the wrong details (price increases and to a lessor degree sales increases) and not enough on the right one’s (inventory). All that matters is that prices are cheap, rates are low, and inventory has come down to levels that leave many cities firmly entrenched as sellers markets. Once buyers stop seeing themselves in the drivers seat, their attitude changes from one of waiting for a better buy to that of getting in before its too late. The vicious circle is replaced by a virtuous one, and sales and price increases will follow. Nothing lasts forever, and the US housing collapse didn’t either.

Falling inventories had to lead the housing turnaround, and that is what we are seeing now. Nationwide in August housing inventories fell from 8.2 months of supply a year ago to 6.1 last month.