What a wild last 30 day’s we’ve had!
I’m going to do a little bit of charting today so we don’t miss out on the next potential Meatball Market (where bad news “just doesn’t matter“) as we get past earnings season without any serious dings. Of course, like Icarus, they higher we go, the further we have to fall, especially when we’re getting there on wax wings but part of our fundamental outlook is looking at market sentiment along with the motives, means and opportunity of the manipulators.
The Fed threw a little monkey-wrench into the works Thursday with a surprise rate move but the market was amazingly unphased and, as you’ll notice on the chart below, we are neatly repeating the same move we saw in early November, when we waited 400 points for the correction that never came – until January 20th of course! This week, we took a few pokes at short plays and got burned and we went into the weekend a little bearish but mostly neutral. Our Buy List is off to the races, of course and only 2 of our 42 trade ideas there (AGNC and DF) are off course – I had meant to do an update this week but there’s no point!
We don’t pay much attention to the Buy List in our daily posts or even in chat because those trades do their job. Ideally, the bulk of your portfolio should be made up of boring, low-touch trades that make nice, consistent returns and THAT allows us to have fun with our more aggressive short-term plays that do demand our regular attention. Someone asked me about allocation the other day and I said that, generally, I feel 75% should be in long-term, well-hedged positions like the ones on our Buy List while the other 25% should be used for more opportunistic trading and, generally, we rarely stray from keeping 1/2 of that in cash to remain flexible.
Of our aggressive portfolio, we try to keep our allocations to no more than 10% of our cash on new positions (
IN PROGRESS
