frommi

Bought some MXP and EUR futures and hedged the rest of my $ exposure back to €. Currency exposure is now 40% MXN, 60% € (home currency). Sold TYO:9885 and TYO:6466, while both still have a discount to NCAV (40-50% upside) i felt that a similar upside in a REIT is a better bet. So i bought more KIM and a little bit more of OXY.

Yes, made around 8% on that trade.

sold most of my MXP futures and pulled the stop for the remaining futures pretty close to the current level. While still the best currency to own according to my system, i want to protect my gains. Maybe i reenter after a larger pullback. Bought more IBM, SPG, KMI.

Looks like we have a similar strategy. :) Bought all the names you mentioned in the last 2 months and Imperial Brands,WBA,T,MDP,WPP,HSY,PEP,CHD,CPB,GIS,CLX. I realized i can`t hold anything forever, so i finally sold VFC and created a new rule to sell if something in my dividend growth portfolio is >25% overvalued, bought more KMI,IBM and DDR with the money.

I think where AI can really be helpful is to predict earnings and then you can use these to build better value portfolios. If you feed an AI with the noise of the markets you will get all types of correlations that don`t hold up in reality. I read an article not long ago on this where they reduced the analysts error rate on earnings projections from 40% to 20%. I can imagine that when you use additional data like credit card information you can get really good earnings forecasts. Personally i wouldn`t trust an AI black box and i am 100% sure that i would leave that approach when the first larger drawdown happens. Its really hard to determine if you just have a "normal" drawdown or if the model has stopped working, so in the end the human will always be the weak link in this regardless of how automated the whole approach is.

I can`t really see how taking out a middleman (that operates at full scale) like CVS or a health insurance with a 3-4% net profit margin changes anything. To me it looks like the pure costs that doctors/hospitals and the pharma industry charge in the US are extraordinary high compared to other countries. The new venture looks like additional costs for BRK/JPM/AMZN to the benefit of its workers, at least until they operate at full scale. Am i missing something?

Why do you think that something like KIM doesn`t compound as fast as BRK? BRK bookvalue growth was around 10% (without tax reform) over the last decade, with a 6.4% dividend yield KIM just has to grow NOI/dividends by 3.6% to match that. Don`t you think that is a pretty low hurdle?

Based on what i know longevity has nothing to do with healthcare costs, its much more a factor of what you eat, drink, smoke and how much you use your body. No drug in the world will deliver what not smoking and drinking, eating healthy and running/weightlifting 2-3 times a week does for you. And the richer you are the more you know and care about that, its not even about the money directly.

DDR common and calls, spinoff in July, same playbook as SRC. "New DDR" is valued similar as BRX right now, which is already damn cheap, but the assets that are spinned are surely not completly worthless.

I am sorry to hear your story and hope you come back refreshed after this has been settled. Can`t you just show your brokerage statements to document your inactivity? I can imagine that these documents are much better at convincing a judge than some online forum posts. And when they show just a handful of stocks i can`t imagine that someone believes that it is a fulltime job to research these.

Thanks for your post! I get paid 5% (interest rate difference between USD and MXN) while waiting for the revaluation with the futures (this is embedded in future prices), so i have time on my side. And because the spread between 10y (inflation expectations) and cash in MXN is zero right now it is very unlikely that inflation/currency devaluation destroy my returns here. Thats what this currency system is all about. But if the spread widens it might be that the system will move me to another currency. I only do this with currencies that have inflation rates below 10%, so MXN is close to this barrier as well. Long term this system has backtested with 5-7% annual returns and since i do this with futures it is on top of every thing else, its literally free alpha. I came to this system while searching for ways to cheaply hedge my currency exposure because i had huge currency losses over the last year that were completly avoidable using this system. If in 3 years i come to the conclusion that it doesn`t work for me, thats fine, at least i tried. But over the last 6 months it has worked as expected.

Seems dangerous! I live in Mexico and we are about to elect a new president and part of congress. The candidate that’s leading (by a lot!) is clearly socialist and against market systems. This doesn’t mean that if he wins he is going to nationalize private companies or move against industry, nor that congress will approve such decisions, but he may control an important part of congress and indeed make some moves against free markets. The peso is reflecting some of these fears and if I were to bet (I’m not), I would bet against the peso! I base my investment decisions on facts, not on news or emotions. But hey, that makes a market. Maybe i am wrong.

It is based on relative purchasing power, term spread and cash interest rates. The mexican peso right now is very undervalued on rppp (~35%) against the USD and ranks very high on term spread and interest rates. Ruerd Heeg on Seeking Alpha has some good articles on currencies.

What gives you comfort that they got a handle on operations so that they can continue repurchasing shares? I only had a cursory glance through the annual report but it seems like lots of issues with assets. It's cheap, but is management competent and honest? I don`t know. But i know that investing in netnets works and that netnets with buybacks work even better.

Bought EPA:ALVEL, Netnet with 65% upside to NCAV and active share buybacks Bought more SRC calls, spinoff is at the end of the month. Bought a large position in MXP futures in my currency system. (Moves 50% of my foreign currency exposure from USD to MXN)

My list of netnets has 0 in the us/canadian right now. I am down to 9 globally which look good, that is a new all time low record (min. discount 30%).

Thanks, i really appreciate your view. Compounding knowledge was also attributed to reading a lot of annual reports, conference call transcripts, quant papers etc. something i probably wouldn`t do as an armchair investor. The DAX hedge has a positive expected value (at least it had one in the past), you can look at my backtest if you like. Of course its just a backtest, but i would even do it with an expected value of zero because it lowers the maximum portfolio drawdown (who wouldn`t buy an insurance that has no cost?). This was not created with publication in mind, so its probably not that easy to understand: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1NeuzDBHovCGqOz0VH0DKVBgUOJRJpB-24c_rgWsTr6U/edit?usp=sharing Expected value for doing it on the Dow Jones is lower (could maybe even improved using a putspread instead of a 5%OTM put), but even there the expected value was slightly positive. And instead of losing 75-80% in the great depression you would have come out of it without losing a lot of money.

My NFLX trade is a gamble, i won`t argue about that and my history with these type of bets is not favorable for me (even though this year i am at +-0 with these type of bets). I still do it from time to time, because i sometimes simply can`t control my gambling habits. But these bets are always very small. I tried to get rid of them by simply having no access to free capital in my brokerage accounts which worked very well in 2016, but since i trade other systems than my NCAV system now (OTC stocks eat all the available margin.) i have to give my gambling habits a little room from time to time. (So i try to control my bad habits by doing them at least half way intelligently.) Other than that i am trying a lot of different stuff and keep doing what works for me personally, the DAX hedge is something i tested and that worked in the past. But of course you can`t get payoffs of 5:1 or 8:1 and win on every single trade. I try to collect a number of quantitative systems over time that suit me and that simply work. My options system for shorting stocks that i tested from Sep 2017 to last month has not worked for me because trading and implementation costs where a lot higher than simulated and expected. So i stopped doing that, even though it was profitable. I am just not the guy who can buy an index fund or AMZN/GOOG/NFLX/AAPL/BRK.B and leave it alone. Its not in my DNA. But my performance over the past 5 years was in line with the market and i expect to do a lot better in the future, especially if we finally get a larger market correction. How do you value the knowledge that compounded over this time?

DAX bear put spread dec 2018, 10000/9400, maxmimum payoff is ~16:1, target is 8:1. For it to reach the payoff the DAX has to fall roughly 20-22% from here and that happens every 4-5 years. This is my "summer" hedge system and has an expected return of 5-7% over time, but the big gain comes from having money to invest after a huge correction. I backtested this for ~100 years and trade it since 2014. In 2015 i did it with normal puts, so the payoff was not that large. I also bought a very small position of NFLX Jan2019 put spread 200/180, because i think that the market forgot that Disney will pull all Marvel content next year and open its own streaming business which will surely be a dent into NFLX growth rates. The payoff is 10:1, target is 5:1. I think these are very good odds and all that is needed is probably the anouncement of Disney that will show that they are on track with their streaming service. Its unbelievable but just 4 months ago NFLX traded at the level required for such a payoff!

Looks like it was fixed last night.

To get prices you can leave out "price". But i tested both versions and none works. MCX:UPRO is something else and NYSEARCA:UPRO doesn`t work. Maybe it is something with Proshares ETF`s that doesn`t work anymore? I also can`t get prices for the ETF "NOBL".

That would be nice, but i doubt it. =GoogleFinance("UPRO") also doesn`t work anymore, any ideas?

I had the same problems, had to rework all my spreadsheets today. USDUSD doesn`t work anymore and some tickers now need the correct stock exchange prefixed. Until today you could get data with FFH.TO, now you have to use TSE:FFH. And they changed the layout on the GoogleFinance site, so for all tickers that are not available directly with the GoogleFinance API i pulled the data from google.com/finance, that also doesn`t work as before. I now use quote.wsj.com to import japanese and singapor stock prices, but the loading takes forever, i would love to see a better idea to get japanese and singapor stock prices into a spreadsheet.

Bought MO,WPP,XOM Covered shorts on HSCG,SPNS,TWLO,IRWD,WAB,RBA. shorted ZB futures with a tight stop above the daily high to protect some of my REIT/dividend portfolio against further increases in the long term interest rate Much more long now than at the start of the year, will keep it this way till the end of april where i will do my normal summer hedging with OTM put options on DAX. Learned a lot the last 6 months about shorting, maybe this helps me get better on the long side but shorting the way i did has increased my portfolio volatility a lot more than i thought, so i will reduce this part of the portfolio for now, even though i made a small profit doing it. But it was not very funny overall. (TWLO has gone up 50% in 3 months and has pretty much sucked up all my other short profits.)

Yes, but rukawa is right, 50m is way to high. The average NCAV stock in my portfolio is between 5 and 50 million and i won`t include anything above 150m because these tend to have lower returns. But adding a filter like >10k daily volume and price > 0.1 should help with the noise, at least in my backtests it did.