Down goes the Dow

Looks like Sally Vix nailed it with calling in March that the Dow would be up to around 30,000. It was around 18,500 at the time. Sally NAILED IT.

Sally Vix wrote:

Looks like Sally Vix nailed it with calling in March that the Dow would be up to around 30,000. It was around 18,500 at the time. Sally NAILED IT.

Nice job. How much money or what percentage did you gain from your prediction?

fisky wrote:

agip wrote:

Zoom up 40% today.

Sometimes the dumbest most obvious ideas are the correct ones.

Who’d have thought zoom could surprise anyone this far into the pandemic? That’s not supposed to happen. When something is this obvious there isn’t supposed to be an advantage to be had.

I owned Zoom and benefited from its rise, then I sold it thinking it had run its course and would at best be average from here on out.

I bought CRM and sold it the DAY BEFORE it bounced up... what... 50-something points?

I bought Ford instead of Tesla. Then, I sold it. At least Ford didn't jump 25% the next day!

Ah well, If I knew what the market was going to do every day, I'd be posting this from a beach somewhere.

I hears you well my friend. Investing is consistently humbling but that's what makes it evergreen interesting.

Bummbull wrote:

Sally Vix wrote:

Looks like Sally Vix nailed it with calling in March that the Dow would be up to around 30,000. It was around 18,500 at the time. Sally NAILED IT.

Nice job. How much money or what percentage did you gain from your prediction?

Thanks. No idea. I am a buy-and-hold guy so obviously I never sold anything at the lows but have been buying the last 5 months. I buy mainly mutual funds and ETFs each month with a few stocks (AMZN and others).

Sally Vix wrote:

Bummbull wrote:

Nice job. How much money or what percentage did you gain from your prediction?

Thanks. No idea. I am a buy-and-hold guy so obviously I never sold anything at the lows but have been buying the last 5 months. I buy mainly mutual funds and ETFs each month with a few stocks (AMZN and others).

Awesome to hear you’re buy and hold guy and didn’t sell any during the lows.

When you state that you bought the last 5 months, did you buy more than usual or the amount you usually invest? Just curious if you changed anything and took advantage from your prediction.

Bummbull wrote:

Sally Vix wrote:

Thanks. No idea. I am a buy-and-hold guy so obviously I never sold anything at the lows but have been buying the last 5 months. I buy mainly mutual funds and ETFs each month with a few stocks (AMZN and others).

Awesome to hear you’re buy and hold guy and didn’t sell any during the lows.

When you state that you bought the last 5 months, did you buy more than usual or the amount you usually invest? Just curious if you changed anything and took advantage from your prediction.

I would never sell during the lows of the market. I always see that as a buying opportunity. Just like in 2008 and in March of this year. I have great confidence in the market. I make a decent salary and plow what I can into the market each month but when the market takes dives like in March or in 2008 I go overboard and invest whatever what I can to take advantage of the buying opportunity. The market is ALWAYS going to rebound. That is my philosophy. it may take 5 months like this year or a few years. But, it is always going to rebound. There is too much money out there and no other investment comes close to the historical returns of the market (11% with dividends re-invested). CDs, for example, have negative real rates of return of 9 of the last 10 years. How can you invest in CDs? They are loser investments. Gold is the biggest crapshoot ever. No other investment comes close. But diversify, diversify and diversity. And never actively managed funds. Index funds beat actively managed funds 70% of the time.

Sally Vix wrote:

Bummbull wrote:

Nice job. How much money or what percentage did you gain from your prediction?

Thanks. No idea. I am a buy-and-hold guy so obviously I never sold anything at the lows but have been buying the last 5 months. I buy mainly mutual funds and ETFs each month with a few stocks (AMZN and others).

since we are keeping score, i'm up 43% ytd and 73% from the march low.

seattle prattle wrote:since we are keeping score, i'm up 43% ytd and 73% from the march low.

Holy cow, good for you! If I've done my math right (assuming you've done your math right), you were only down 17% on the year at the bottom of the trough? Meaning that you've done way better than the markets both on the way down and on the way back up.

Is that your whole investment portfolio, or some specific part of it? Keen to know what basket of holdings have had that performance this year, you must be a certifiable genius deserving of way more respect on here! The only way I can figure out how you could have managed this feat would have been to have started the year with a fairly conservative portfolio that minimized losses (sitting on a lot of cash) and then timed the bottom fairly well and went hard into big tech, including TQQQ. Both of which would be demonstrated (in hindsight) as very savvy moves.

Thx, and my gut impression was that i was down about 30% for the year at the low, but you are right, i was down 19%. (though it felt like a lot more).

The real beauty of it though, is that i was well protected at the low, with a large portion of my portfolio in cash, selling on the way down. I think this is important. Being able to protect the downside risk is major. It comes at a premium, so to be that well protected, yet still get back in quick enough to outpace the market on the way back up is what i would shoot for.

But I don't think the overall performance is really as outstanding as you say. In fairness, one would have to compare it to the indices.

The SNP 500 for the year, was down 31% at the low, and up 11% now YTD.

The Nasdaq for the year was down 23% at the low, and up 33% now YTD.

My portfolio for the year was down 19% at the low, and up 44% now YTD.

So, you can see that i simply beat the Nasdaq some at preservation of capital, and in the rebound phases.

My portfolio is quite simply FANGMAN, with Apple and Google dating back to the turn of the century (hooray for that), and more recently (2 or 3 years ago) taking a significant stake in Amazon and to a lesser extent in Netflix and Microsoft in that order, On top of that, I have the Nasdaq 100 and Tech triple leveraged ETFs., That's about it with a few little things for interest. Good chunk of BRK, too.

I have a work 401K/403B that has done well overall, but this year is only just reaching a new ATH in the last week or so. What screws me up there, by comparison, is their limitations on the number of times you can trade it in any given quarter.

Anyway, in a nutshell, my portfolio is very aggressive and i'm very comfortable using the leveraged ETFs to give me greater than 100 % exposure to the market. As a general rule I don't trade the FANGMAN portion except to add to positions slowly, and at these levels, i haven't added to any of them for about the last 2 months.

seattle prattle wrote:... in a nutshell, my portfolio is very aggressive...

Very true, and WAY too aggressive for my tastes, at my age... :-)

As you may have noticed from my recent post, we just crept into the black (in our investment portfolios; not overall, where we've done a fair bit better) a couple of days ago, which underperforms S&P 500, lagging its emergence into positive territory by about a month (but outperforms other indices I benchmark against; I am not American), and feels "about right" for my own risk tolerance, given proximity to retirement (0 to 15 years, depending on whether my employer, colleagues or clients pi$$ me off... :-)). We were also "only" down by about 12-13% at the worst of it. So I guess we "beat you" then, in a metric that doesn't matter...

VS-SJW-IR-TS idiot wrote:

seattle prattle wrote:... in a nutshell, my portfolio is very aggressive...

Very true, and WAY too aggressive for my tastes, at my age... :-)

As you may have noticed from my recent post, we just crept into the black (in our investment portfolios; not overall, where we've done a fair bit better) a couple of days ago, which underperforms S&P 500, lagging its emergence into positive territory by about a month (but outperforms other indices I benchmark against; I am not American), and feels "about right" for my own risk tolerance, given proximity to retirement (0 to 15 years, depending on whether my employer, colleagues or clients pi$$ me off... :-)). We were also "only" down by about 12-13% at the worst of it. So I guess we "beat you" then, in a metric that doesn't matter...

No, that matters a lot! At least i think it does. A term that came up here on the site about a week ago was, how durable are your gains? Well, one like yours that only was down a bit over 10% is pretty solid, imo. That's outstanding. And you are still managed to be on the plus side for the year. That must feel good to know that with everything the market and economy through add us in this world pandemic, your portfolio only dipped by so little.

As for retirement, for us, it's about time. My wife made the move recently, and i'm playing it day by day.

Good comparing notes with you, and take care.

Spot on Sally!

Unemployment claims are dropping fast but there's also news of a lot of long term layoffs coming up in travel and hospitality. A lot of eviction moratoriums are up as well but in my opinion that's overblown.

Not sure what to make of it all. Also aren't infections slowing down everyday?

How did the airlines rip at the open with these layoffs coming?

Here we go, in for a fun ride! Wheeeh!

Ride...just bought some TSLA and PYPL, already underwater. Planned to sell them on inevitable bump up, hopefully tomorrow, maybe not...

Wth is going on?

Maserati wrote:Wth is going on?

It must be (Black) Monday somewhere...?

I think I jinxed us all complimenting SP earlier today... :-)

Welcome back to the party mas!

Maserati wrote:

Wth is going on?

Random -3% days are pretty much the norm for 2020. Nothing to see here if you ask me.

Buy the dip