The rising tide lifts all boats is a stock market saying. The bull keeps running. I remain cautiously bullish, now slightly behind SPY for calendar 2025.
Here are some ETFs year to date:
GLD gold 27.4%
SLV silver 24.2%
EEM emerging mkt 19.4%
QQQ Nasdaq 100 12.9%
SPY SP500 9.8%
IWM Russell 2000 2.8%
TLT US20 yr -1.1%
My trading account +9.7%. QQQ has leap frogged ahead. Precious metals and emerging markets are even further ahead. A market correction can happen at any time. Reddit sentiment has become more bullish, especially on NVDA. Nvidia reports Wed August 27th. I remain cautiously bullish. Some small fish are going big into calls. NVDA is already over $4 trillion in market cap. That’s more than all the public companies in Germany. Is Germany and rest of Europe doomed to be irrelevant going forward? I doubt that, but stranger things have happened.
As a hedge against a correction, I do a QQQ backratio put spread Dec 550/520. Buying one put at the 550 strike, selling two at 520. Max profit is a 11% correction at September expiration (577 current). If the market crashes, the backratio starts losing below 490. I can trade around the hedge.
Some other stock market cliches are don’t fight the Fed, don’t fight the tape, don’t chase. All of these apply to the current market. If there is a market correction, Fed easing becomes much more likely. The trend has been mostly up. Chasing the leaders can hazardous. Those buying out ot the money, NVDA calls with that stock at all time highs, and already number one in market cap, tends to be a low percentage game.
My biggest non-index holdings continue to be NVDA, BRKB, AMZN. I have tiny positions in some of the other mega cap tech names: AAPL, GOOG, META, TSLA. If anything I am more cautious than I have been, but still lean bullish. If and when the market corrects, buying the dip remains the plan.