Performance

Until the new website is up and I decide whether or not to trade a real money portfolio (it would be great as a model portfolio rather than a tracking one and would have much better performance) as a model portfolio or not, we'll have to stick with the tracking portfolios which are way too many positions, performance is diluted do to the number of positions.

The problems I face with a real money portfolio are : 1) My members' should come first before trades in that portfolio, as you know the market can change in the time it takes me to write a small market update. So in this respect I either don't pay attention to our hard earned money like I should or I don't give 100% to my members like I should. I have toyed around with the idea of a small portfolio of about $1000 because these are the hardest to manage, your risk management has to be spot on, but I think it would be an interesting challenge.

2)  Although I would NEVER do something like this, conceivably if I put out a trade idea and front ran it, I'd be making money at the expense of my members and I don't even want to be accused of something like that.

3) I have concerns that a model portfolio would be an endorsement of a specific position so long as it is listed and as you know, I only endorse a position at very particular areas that rarely last more than a few days, after that the dynamics of the trade and risk:reward relationship change dramatically and while I would hold the position, I would not encourage others to enter the same position unless it came up again as a new trade/add to position in the right place at the right time.

4) This is sort of the same as 3, I would not want members to feel the 5 or 6 positions I would trade at max would be the positions they should take. I put out a lot of ideas because we have an incredible array of different trading styles. I personally am very tolerant of risk, I wouldn't want someone taking the same trade I may have took based on nothing more than timing, thinking it is a superior trade to others put forth. It's important the trade fits you, best of all it's great when member's chose their own trades based on market updates and other information because they are really making the trade their own and trading is not about one style being better than another, it's about what works for you: your risk tolerance, your portfolio size, tour objectives, the time you have available to watch the market and your experience.

These are just a few things I have to consider as I'm deciding what the new website will incorporate.

If you have things you'd like to see incorporated, feel free to send me an email, but several things I'm looking at will include:

-Candidates list-these are positions I'm interested in, but the timing isn't quite there.
-Some sort of open positions, the problem I had with this last time with a Spreadsheet was updating it took hours every day, I prefer to update a position in a post which is more useful and at least I know someone is in the trade rather than updating dozens of ideas no one is in.
-Model Portfolio, however this is my last priority as far as my time goes as well as the issues above
-Specialized custom email filters, allowing you to pick and chose what types of updates and trade ideas you want in real time, the rest you can look over at the site or receive all.
-Risk Calculator so you can easily figure out position sizing
-If I can make the site more time efficient, than I might add a weekly live seminar
-A more complete collection of useful articles/links, I have thousands of posts, some very useful.
-Possibly a Trading system or trend classification system, this will cost a lot of money to do, but I'd like to be able to allow you to enter a symbol and get a 3C perspective of short, intermediate and long term.


There are quite a few more things, I want to avoid things like quotes as you can get them anywhere.

In any case, a new website was one of the New Year's Resolutions for this year, but we have grown so fast in the last 6 months and really exponentially over the last few weeks, we are literally out of space for new members on the Blogger platform. A few things I'll have to reduce like email support, for current members it will stay the same, for new members it will likely be an additional option with a limit per week, unless I can convince one of my longer term members who understands 3C to come and work for me-George, Sam?


Any way, we continue to do very well with the large tracking portfolio, I just looked as of the close today and really it doesn't matter to me all that much, but it tells me a lot about how other traders are negotiating this market and in a way, it's a sentiment/performance indicator.

While I think finding your own style is crucial, I also think there's a right tool for every job and out transition to weekly puts and calls and holding them for 1 to 2 days based on the signals was absolutely the right tool for this market, now that volatility is moving up again, that will change.

Here's the performance of the options portfolio which has been astounding, I think we are somewhere around 16 or 17 trades in February with only 1 loser of -2.5% and 1 possible loser that is still open, everything else has been a big success and I was doing some spring cleaning in there today and closed out 1 GLD option position I forgot about for a 600% gain.

The Weekly Rank is #8 with an overall portfolio return of 12%, that's better than most hedge funds did all last year.

The #8 position means we are in the top 1/10th of 1%. What this tells me is that our tactic of hit and run, not getting greedy, not staying in the game long enough for the house's edge to overcome our position and being selective about the positions we have taken, has been absolutely the right tool for the market environment, which is now changing due to increased volatility.

The Options Portfolio on a monthly basis which is funny, because I'm not a big options fan and I'd think on a monthly basis we'd be near the bottom for lack of trades, but we have had quite a few over the last 3 weeks, so we are at #19 with a nearly 25% gain on the month, boy would I like to annualize that performance!

At #19, we have a lot more competition in the monthly category, but are still at an impressive 1/10th of 1%

The weekly Equities portfolio is where we have been building positions in expectation of some of what we saw yesterday, these are longer term positions, but they have done extremely well over the last couple of weeks, we're at #42 of 1519 with a +6.36% gain on something over 25 positions that are in the tracking portfolio so that's pretty impressive for the week.

In any case, this just affirms that we have been on the right track both short term and long term, the longer term equities is just starting to come in to its own, 6 months from now I'd love to see where we are.

Again if you have suggestions or if you build websites, feel free to email me. If I don't get back right away know it is because I'm either overwhelmed with work or I'm taking an hour to eat with my wife.