Both Portfolio’s Are Soaring

What a wacky two weeks its been! Sorry I've neglected you readers this long. Sometimes though, a man's just gotta make a living! These markets have been roiling so heavily, that I barely had time for lunch.

Hopefully most of you have taken a glance at my portfolios. If anybody has ever had any doubts about whether trading beats a buy-and-hold strategy, take a glance at this year's results to date: My 3-stock portfolio is up by 41% since last March, which translates into a 98% annualized return. Just in case you think its pure luck, look at the 6-stock portfolio of growth stocks (and the QQQ index): in two months, it's grown 21%. If I can keep that pace for a year, that would yield 118%.

By the way, I finally got around to adding the growth portfolio to the web site. Just click on the "Portfolio Tab" , then towards the bottom of the page you'll see the link for growth stock portfolio (6-10 stocks).
Similarly, to view the trading history for it, select the "Trade History" tab, then at the bottom look for the link to the Alternate Growth Portfolio History.

If you peruse the history a bit, you'll notice something that may strike you as very odd: in absolute numbers, I lose money more often than I make it. But this is more than offset by the size of my gains when compared to that of my losses.

This particular strategy will always do that: I get 2-3 small losses, usually in the 1-3% range, followed by 1 big gain, usually in the 5%-25% range. Then the whole process starts all over again. So far over all times frames I've tested it, this has been the pattern through flat, bull and bear markets.

Of course I would love to eliminate the losses, but so far, whenever I try to tweak the system to reduce these, I end up lowering the overall performance. I'll keep on tinkering with it, but in the meantime, I'll learn to live with the frequent small losses, as long as I get the big number at the end.