Wednesday, September 30, 2009

Newsletter and Portfolio Performance Update for 9/30/09

The last few months have seen a surge of interest in the Stock of the Week (SOTW) selection and has led to several posts on the subject, including a detailed September 7th piece with the title, Stock of the Week ‘Sequential Portfolio’ Up 466% Since 3/30/08 Launch.

With the increased interest in the SOTW has come increased interest in the VIX and More portfolios in general and has led to my resuming coverage of the Aggressive Trader Portfolio in the newsletter. The Aggressive Trader was one of the original features of the newsletter, but in the early months I became concerned that the newsletter was tilting too much in the direction of model portfolios and stock selection, at the expense of original research on volatility, market sentiment and related subjects. Based on reader feedback over the past few months, I have made some refinements and now believe the newsletter strikes an appropriate balance between commentary, analysis and trading ideas. A large part of the reason that I added the Aggressive Trader back to the fold is that the portfolio has a great deal in common with the SOTW. As recently as two weeks ago, for instance, 79% of the Aggressive Trader holdings were represented by former SOTW selections.

The graphic below shows the updated performance data for the VIX and More portfolios for 2008, 2009 and since inception, both in absolute terms and relative to their respective benchmarks. As noted previously, these are long-only portfolios of individual stocks that do not invest in ETFs or options and are rebalanced only on weekends. The Focus portfolios derive their name from the fact that each portfolio is limited to only five stocks. Both the Aggressive Trader and Stock of the Week portfolios were launched on March 30, 2008 and use the S&P 500 index as a benchmark. The Focus Growth 2 Model Portfolio was launched on August 31, 2008 and utilizes the S&P 500 index as a benchmark; the Focus Foreign Growth, was launched on March 30, 2008 and uses as a benchmark the EAFE (Europe, Australasia and the Far East) Index ETF (EFA).

The unquestioned star performer has been the Stock of the Week ‘Sequential Portfolio,’ which racked up a 97.7% gain during the turbulent 2008 markets and has easily surpassed that mark with a 218.2% gain for the first nine months of 2009. Two other portfolios have had stellar years so far: the Focus Foreign Growth portfolio is up 103.2% year-to-date; and the Aggressive Trader portfolio is up 75.5% during the same period. The laggard among the group has been the Focus Growth 2 portfolio, which is the only portfolio not to have a cumulative gain since inception. Somewhat ironically and to my slight consternation, two sister portfolio to Focus Growth 2 have been up and running for about five years and sport cumulative returns of about 350% during this time.

In terms of content, the newsletter has been relatively stable during the last three months, with no significant changes in terms of the standard sections. For more information on the standard sections and content, readers are advised to investigate:

As a reminder, I am currently offering a 14-day free trial to the subscriber newsletter for new subscribers.

No comments: