Most markets rally. I mostly follow along, so self-grade is B. SPY now up 7.8% for calendar 2022, my trading account +7.9%. This trails the Nasdaq100, but I’ll take up over 7% over four months or so.
Here are the tracking percentages, without dividends:
QQQ Nasdaq 100 18.9%
GLD gold 8.6%
SPY SP500 7.8%
TLT US20 yr 7.3%
SLV silver 4.4%
EEM emerging mkt 2.9%
IWM Russell 2000 1.8%
Notable, is that all are now green for 2023, and TLT is tracking with SPY. 2022 was a hard down year for stocks and bonds. So much so that some people abandoned the old 60/40 stock/bond portfolio.
I am still keeping a large reserve, in case of sudden drops, in case better opportunities come up. There is chatter about the bearish stance by many portfolio managers and individual investors. The standard play is to go opposite. By its nature, all in, all out market timing is a losers game.
Why is that? Because tops form with a relative maximum of buyers, and bottoms the opposite. This means that the average market timer is likely to lose. Most people are in cash or short near the bottom, and fully invested or leveraged long at the tops. I don’t see many online posts about being leveraged long.
The over aggressive posts were about once a week on Reddit while the bull market was roaring ahead. The post title refers to an old movie, The Mouse that Roared. This run has that kind of feel. Not that many on board, not that many are optimistic. I include myself in that camp. However, I’ve managed nearly a market return with what I feel is lower than market risk. I’ll take that.
Again for newer readers, I am not as young as the average person active on the Internet. As such I need to be more conservative, because there is not as much time to replace losses with money from wages.
