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Underperforming Portfolio -- (Friendly Contest)


JEast

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  • 3 months later...

CRM

VEEV

TXTR

STPFQ

DDD

TWTR

NQ

VVUS

QCOR

VJET

I'm guessing the average short portfolio posted in this thread must be doing well so far in 2014:

 

Ticker Start price now return

CRM 54.86 50.76 -7.47%

VEEV 32.33 18.7 -42.16%

TXTR 29.95 17.76 -40.70%

STPFQ 0.55 0.31 -43.64%

DDD 94.19 44.8 -52.44%

TWTR 67.5 42.62 -36.86%

NQ 16.06 11.16 -30.51%

VVUS 9.41 5.06 -46.23%

QCOR 55.19 80.4 45.68%

VJET 43.33 14.57 -66.37%

Average -32.07%

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  • 4 weeks later...

AAMC  +6%

HCI      -22%

NGVC  -48%

ONVO  -35%

PII      -8%

SFM    -27%

TFM      -25%

TSLA    +40%

UVE      -17%

VJET    -67%

 

Hurricanes , groceries,  3D printing , and those cool ATV's on steroids are the keys to my basket

 

decided to have a look at this.

 

-20% average, 80% hit rate (negative absolute performance). Looking at the baskets i bet a lot of people are doing much better.

 

- Hurricanes (HCI + UVE) doing well on the short side, still think there is more to come

- Groceries (NGVC, SFM, TFM) also doing well, think that's pretty much played out, starting to see GARP write-ups on TFM and WFM, SFM is still probably expensive

- 3D printing (ONVO, VJET), did well but i think borrow would've hurt you a lot here in the real world

- Cool ATV's on steroids (PII), down a bit

 

Losers: AAMC, TSLA

 

EDIT: Russell -0.4% and SPY +4.7% over time period 1/3 --> 5/27

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BBRY

BBY

BH

CBRL

FB

GME

HLF

MJNA

NFLX

TWTR

 

My picks are doing pretty well so far, Just FB and NFLX losing money.

 

BBRY     

-4.84%

BBY

-33.16%

BH

-14.11%

CBRL

-8.08%

FB

+16.03%

GME

-24.89%

HLF

-19.14%

MJNA

0%

NFLX

+9.92%

TWTR

-54.80%

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1. DDD -46.0%

2. CZR -15.6%

3. CSGP -10.9%

4. JASO -1.9%

5. MU +31.6%

6. NFLX +11.5%

7. SHLD -20.0%

8. SPWR +3.6%

9. TWTR -51.5%

10. UA +14.9%

11. YGE -45.5%

 

Not quite as good -11.8% on average versus rkbabang 's -13.3%, thepupil's -20.3% and Hielko's -32.1% :)

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  • 2 months later...

Here are the standings as of August 5:

 

ItsAValueTrap -45.07%

Orange -25.97%

Hielko -25.91%

watsa_is_a_randian_hero -22.54%

thepupil -20.75%

Frommi -13.58%

Edward -12.48%

Constructive -7.94%

watchwoord -7.50%

Rkbabang -4.89%

enoch01 -3.03%

Racemize -2.20%

txitxo -0.36%

Otsog -0.29%

deepValue 0.17%

JEast 1.11%

Zorrofan 1.24%

compoundinglife 3.93%

longinvestor 12.02%

 

Congrats to Orange, who is in the lead. 

Many people (such as myself) did not strictly meet the requirements of this contest or chose stocks that weren't trading.

 

Orange:  Check your private messages?

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  • 4 months later...

Oh and a personal takeaway from this is the two worst performing shorts in my basket were those I had on in largest size in real life (TSLA and UVE).

 

Conviction weighting shorts is a tough thing to do. Most of the good short sellers I know are more or less equal weighted and diversified.

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Here are the standings by my calculations.  Congratulations to Orange!

 

Orange -68.94%

ItsAValueTrap -53.97%

Constructive -48.09%

Hielko -31.12%

watsa_is_a_randian_hero -23.44%

Edward -18.40%

txitxo -16.30%

thepupil -15.03%

watchwoord -12.44%

Frommi -11.15%

Racemize -7.56%

Rkbabang -6.85%

deepValue -4.75%

JEast 3.42%

compoundinglife 3.46%

enoch01 8.57%

longinvestor 13.08%

Otsog 13.64%

Zorrofan 15.10%

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whoops, read this wrong on my phone. nice job orange, value trap and constructive.

 

as a group, these results are actually pretty spectacular and would be the envy of the hedge fund community. 68% of participants made absolute returns on shorting in a year the S&P was up nicely and the russell was more or less flat.

 

In the real world borrow costs and portfolio management likely would have led to different results (I know it did for me at least!!!).

 

But still, good job

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Guest longinvestor

Bringing up the bottom of the list, I suck at identifying short ideas. At least in a 1-year time frame. However, I will be tracking the long term track record of my short ideas to see if my thesis is correct.

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Nice job folks! Thanks for putting the spreadsheet together Glenn. Should we start a new contest for 2015?

 

I think it's easier if we go on Motley Fool CAPS.  It tracks stock performance including dividends.  It's somewhat more realistic because you can't trade really small stocks with low liquidity.

http://caps.fool.com/

 

Here's my CAPS account:

http://caps.fool.com/player/glenn12345.aspx

 

In retrospect, I think it's somewhat obvious what the best strategy for this contest is:

 

-Companies that will likely go bankrupt

-Frauds

-Stocks that are expensive to borrow

-Shorting real companies like TSLA, fancy supermarkets, etc. etc. is a trap.

-To a small degree, you need to short crazy stocks if you want to be #1.  A guaranteed 30% loss across your entire portfolio will not put you in first place, even though -30% is a pretty good performance.

 

If you simply pick the 10 most-expensive-to-borrow stocks, that basket will likely underperform the market.

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I work at TMF.

 

The key to winning at CAPS is "red thumbing" OTC crap and leveraged ETFs. My coworker was the king of the game for years and used this strategy with great success. I have an account, too, but I seldom update it so it's gradually gone from 99+ to 96.

 

Also, because accuracy is counted for your ranking, scorebank like crazy when you're +5 on a pick... if you're not in a contest like this, anyway.

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I work at TMF.

 

The key to winning at CAPS is "red thumbing" OTC crap and leveraged ETFs. My coworker was the king of the game for years and used this strategy with great success. I have an account, too, but I seldom update it so it's gradually gone from 99+ to 96.

 

Also, because accuracy is counted for your ranking, scorebank like crazy when you're +5 on a pick... if you're not in a contest like this, anyway.

 

That's mostly what I do on CAPS.  That, plus I short whatever stocks are the most expensive to borrow according to Interactive Brokers.  And I have some ways of easily finding frauds and stock promotions.

 

CAPS is more challenging because you can build score faster if you have 200 ideas rather than 10 ideas.  Also, it won't let you short a lot of the OTC BB and Pink Sheet scams.  You can't short the ticker symbols that show up in your Spam email folder for example.

 

At the end of the day, I do think that it's really, really easy to find awful stocks.

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  • 8 years later...

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