frommi

Thats great! I`ve built a lot of models on portfolio123, too. But i haven`t found one that beat my NCAV model consistently. I tried to incorporate some of Olikea`s ranking/models with >30% annual returns, but i was not able to trade it profitably, because as soon as the model has a drawdown i questioned the whole model`s approach. That`s probably my own handycap. Do you trade the model directly with the trade interface or do you manually enter trades?

I am always curious to learn something new, can you point to resources that prove the validity of your approach? (luck vs. skill??) Or is it "just" a momentum approach? How do you find your stocks, how do you determine when to enter/exit? Since value investing is such a broad concept ("pay less than something is worth") i can hardly see how that is not working for anyone. The hard part is figuring out what something is worth, and maybe you were just not that good at it because you probably looked in the wrong places and tried the hard stuff first. If you ever give value investing another try I would focus on NCAV and dividend growth stocks because they are the easiest to value. Regardless, i am bored right now, so please give me something to read regarding your new approach. :)

Bought them back for 0.18$ to reduce risk. (because of leverage, but i keep a portion of the stock that i bought with cash.)

Thanks, but that was just luck. Thanks for your comment, that was the reason to think harder and look again at the numbers and buy some more stock. Critical comments are underrated!

How do you know that if you haven`t been there in years? :) The financials tell a different story with stable/slighlty growing sales the past 4 years. I wouldn`t shop there either, but my wife wants to go to a similar shop every 3-4 weeks especially in the weeks before christmas. Maybe i am wrong, but i think i have the odds on my side.

Wrote BBBY FEB2019 12$ puts for 1.29$. Stock is reasonable cheap if margins stabilize on typical retailer levels (which they did the last two quarters) and these option premiums are so fat its unbelievable. This name is also very hated right now, can`t remember that last time i read so many negative comments and articles on SA.

In the bloomberg article is a list. Looks like a Graham-Type investor that mainly buys stocks below or at NCAV and that are still profitable. 3-7% weight per position. And i think all of them pay dividends. Very interesting that this is still possible with 170 million $ in capital.

+22% after fees/costs, before taxes, in €. Was up by 30% at the end of November but fucked up my trading in the last two weeks, while i must admit that the volatility really helped my future trading. But I still have a lot to learn und stay more disciplined. Over the past 5 years my portfolio outperformed the MSCI World by 5% per year with only half the drawdowns (-10%) and no loss years, while still testing a lot of stuff and wasting a lot of money on unnecessary speculations. Dividends now cover all my basic living expenses, so i am inclined to think that i am financially free now. --------------------- Longs: (-4.6%) -2.5% NCAV (sold nearly all ncav stocks in H1, -16% if i didn`t make the switch) -5.3% Dividend stocks (increased the size from 20% to 97% of networth at the end of Q2, market performance -8.8% in that timeframe) +3.2% Options (Bullish) (selling put options on single stocks, on margin, never more than +15% leverage) Shorts: (+17.7%) -3.0% Options (Bearish) (Short Stocks Experiment, 15 stocks from a portfolio123-system, bear call spread+put options) -> too expensive! +3.7% Options (Bearish) (DAX Puts+TSLA bear call spreads) +17% Trading futures (short only, trend following approach using Dow Theory and Elliott wave analysis, max. 50%-100% short exposure, NQ+RTY, ~320 Trades, 60% win rate (excl. break-even trades), profit factor 2.5, 50% of trades stopped out @ break-even) +8.8% Currencies (EUR/USD, MXN futures in H1) -------------------- Numbers included in performance above: Commissions, fees, interest: 2.7% (1% expensive trading accounts,1.2% Options,0.5% futures). OTC and british stocks most expensive. This was mainly because i liquidated the NCAV portfolio and tested shorting stocks with options, should be way lower next year. -------------------- Achievements: DAX forecaster of the year: https://www.informunity.de/dax_ranking.p?ST=Y Best DAX forecaster over 5 years: https://www.informunity.de/dax_ranking.p?PO=0&ST=T -------------------- Learnings: NCAV: - Don`t buy low quality NCAV stocks anymore. Check past earnings record. Only buy when price/(past earnings)<10 or ideally when current p/e<10. Maybe returns are lower, but the win rate is higher. - Don`t sell quality netnets below NCAV, have more patience! (Sold PBSV @ ~0.65, it ran up to 1.2$.) - Focus on developed markets like USA, Japan, Singapur and avoid debt. (EV<Mktcap) Dividends: - Reduce holdings to 15-20. (done already) - Future growth rate is the most important input into valuation, so use all sources to get a good estimate. (analyst projections, guidance, own estimates) Future trading: - NEVER RISK MORE THAN 0.5% per trade! Had to encapsulate this, because my fuckups usually are a violation of this rule. One can always increase the number of contracts when the stop on the trade is on break-even. Options: - 30-40 days out, buy back at 50%. Don`t buy back because of gut feeling. - Only buy options with >1 year to expiration. One exception: DAX put options in summer So it looks like market timing is my niche, but i am still trying to get better at the other stuff. No experiments planned for 2019, so my R&D expenses should go down. Only speculation in 2019 will be the short on Tesla, because i think that the constant flow of information via Twitter gives me an edge here and i already made money on it in 2018 with good timing.

Merry Christmas, thanks for all contributions and this great place!

Sold DIS,MPW,AMNF and a part of SKT and HSY to buy AVGO,LON:IMB and BEN. Also bought a LEAP call on KMI.

Sold BRX, XOM and bought more MSM,ENB,IRM. Bought back SYF puts. I am slowly reducing my diversification and try to be a little more concentrated ( but within my limits and always with the goal to increase my income and the safety/quality/growth of that income ). My EUR/USD hedge was stopped out at breakeven.

Sold WHG (didn`t meet my "buy more" test on a second inspection, they will have lots of redemptions next quarter) and PEP (reached fair value). Bought more ENB (got a lot more comfortable after the latest earnings) and TAP. Bought back the FB put with a small gain and sold some puts on SYF.

1.) These are 100% of my life savings, its an irreplaceable asset base. 2.) I make mistakes, a lot of mistakes. 3.) With 10% annual returns, i can live a comfortable life. Why risk what i have for something i don`t need? 4.) For 99% of people in the world my portfolio is already very concentrated. 5.) I did a lot of tests with different ranking criteria on my watchlist and the Top15 portfolios always came out as having the best returns. I don`t know why that is, but that is the reason my maximum position size is 6.6% (1/15). There was only one ranking that was better and that was past 4 week return, Top5 was best there, but Top3 was a lot worse, so i don`t trust it. And now the most important aspect: Handpicking stocks out of my ranking ALWAYS performed worse. My conclusion: I am a bad stockpicker, but i know how to create portfolios that outperform.

If it looked rosy, you wouldn`t get it that cheap. But at a 2019 P/E of 6 a lot of bad stuff is already priced into the stock. But its also still a small position for me, a recession next year may derail the investment.

bought more SYF, looks like an overreaction to the WMT news.

Pretty boring right now, size from top to bottom. Tobacco/Consumer ~25%, 25% REITs, 25% Energy and Industrials, 25% Healthcare/Utilities/Other. 5% dividend yield and 5-7% expected dividend growth on a portfolio level, 10-50% undervalued by my rough estimates. I won`t post 50% annual returns with this, but i also doubt that i get >-50% drawdowns :). October drawdown was ~-1.5% in $, +1% in €. KMI (6.6%) SRC MO SKT MSM (5.4%) WBA PM LON:BATS SPG D OXY (3%) HKG:0398 (the only netnet right now, but of course its paying a dividend and trades at a P/E<7) FAST KIM TAP XOM CAH T LON:IMB HSY (2.5%) PPL ENB (2%) CCI MPW CVS IRM MDP SYF (1.2%) BRX PEP DIS WHG EPR STOR BP AMNF OMC UBP WPC SITC (0.3%) Options: -FB puts 145$ strike 21DEC2018 Trade/hedge positons: EUR futures that cover 100% of the dollar exposure with a break even stop around 1.134$.

Sold CHD (reached my definition of expensive),VTR (reached fair value). Bought more MSM and ENB. Bought back the puts i sold on FB pre earnings. (value collapsed from 6.7$ to 1.3$ in just 3 days!) Sold 145$ puts on FB again with expiration date 12/21/2018. Hedged currencies this morning into JPY and EUR, but with tight stops. (Stop on EUR is at break even already, so this hedge is essentially free now.)

Sold PG,EIX,NNN,IBM and bought more SRC,MSM,FAST,ENB,OXY,TAP,KIM. PG,EIX and NNN reached fair value and IBM just suxx. Took my tax losses because i think that the Redhat deal was a huge value destruction and probably an act of desperation. Maybe that marks the bottom, but i don`t have to make back my money the same way i lost it. And the realized tax losses allowed me to buy more of other stocks.

Small update on currencies, since the spread between long term and short term interest rates in mexico has widened its currency is not in the top spot anymore. CAD and USD are still in the top 5 so i sold all currency hedges over the past weeks with a small loss.

Sold the spread for +-0 because i don`t like how strong the stock behaves in this market. Bought more KMI (reached my personal position size limit now) and MSM.

We can agree that studying FB and GOOG makes sense for anybody, because the economy of the advertising systems they use is just amazing (at least as long as demand for digital ads is growing, should this turn it can result in a double whammy). But i disagree that KO,KHC and PG struggled because of them, they just had problems with a strong USD and falling demand for unhealthy products over the last 10 years. I wouldn`t even call Google or Facebook Tech companies, in my mind they are just advertising spaces. But since they were overpriced for much of the last years they have together only performed in line with the market over the past two years, so there was nothing that a value investor has missed. MSFT is also interesting, but much too expensive right now. For other tech stocks like NVDA or TXN i would argue that you are looking at a cyclical industry just at the top. This is a dangerous place to be. And AMZN, NFLX or TSLA are not really investable for me at the current point in time. AAPL can be seen as a consumer products company. I agree with packer here, the tech sector is wide spread and you can`t brush them all together.

How did you determine this? I know at least two investors of group A that outperformed the market over the last two years (using low P/NCAV) and i am sure there are more than enough that outperformed over that timeframe with B), too. If tech doesn`t belong into my circle of competence why should i bet there? (My problem there is always to determine the longevity of the cashflows, because of that i also don`t invest in biotech/pharma.)

But why sell the German index specifically? This is my personal anti-home bias. According to https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=76248 Italy would work best, but i don`t think there is an active option market for that index. But when you look at the DAX holdings there are a lot of awful, overleveraged and cyclical businesses in it. The best is that no professional investor will ever use this effect, most investors i know laugh about it or dismiss it as a statistical fluke. (Should this change, i will probably reduce my position size)

That was my seasonality trade. I buy these puts every year on the first day of May and sell at the end of October or if the DAX goes down by 20%. Over the past 100 years this has hedged a portfolio without extra cost. Every 4-5 years the puts are 5-6 baggers. While this looks like an even trade it boosts portfolio performance by 3-4% on average and reduces drawdowns from -50% to -20%. That was also the a good way to survive the bear market of 1929->1932. I am a pretty fearfull guy and need this stuff to stay fully invested. I am sure i will look stupid for selling them one day too early on monday. :)

And sold some 140$ nov18 puts on FB for 5.6$, the premium is really fat. Looks like the market expects a pretty big move after earnings. *EDIT* I also bought a TSLA bear call spread 300/400 MAR2019 for 47$ credit because i just love the drama.