On second thought.....
I stopped tending the portfolio, in part, because I don't enjoy doing it. Looking at this discussion in a "Friday evening after the SUGN week" mood, I feel that I'd be nuts to to focus on portfolio maintenance here. von Emster gets paid to manage -- it turns out, to lose -- OPM. I don't. Further, "bounce" was established to reflect the portfolio picks of Metcalf, V1, Suzman, Silverman and those that picked stuff like that. The out-of-the-gate big gains were Silverman picks. We cut back on some of those, and backed out of AGPH way early and against V1's and Metcalf's best advice. Held a couple of stocks that got clocked pretty bad, and backed out of one.... AVIR..... at a foolish time and against (?) Suzman's best advice.
I don't want to focus on the maintenance of a portfolio, particularly when it's so different from what I'm doing real-life. So, maybe I won't go back and revise the portfolios..... I just got heady after a good week.
Can Jill turn a portfolio pointer from one person to another? Anybody *want* to maintain the portfolios?
I was brought to acknowledge, in this thread and others, that Freudenthal and von Emster had very precisely predicted where one should have their money for Summer, '98. Freudenthal warned about a stalled third-tier. He was correct. I was wrong. Bad drought in my kind of stocks, and particularly in a couple of my biggies.
PB has pointed out that the period immediately preceding the foundation of T/FIF was a tough one. I said repeatedly that I was sitting on dead money, watching SSVE et al. beat the pants off of any hard-core third-tier freak........... any one of the ninety seven of us, worldwide, who were stupid enough to have ever endured The Year of the Internet.
Just a tiny diversion.
von Emster was correct..... the lower tiers were punished, Summer '98. He was correct, it was best to be in big caps. He was correct, there were several very productive shorts in biotech.
And yet we're outperforming him by a substantial margin. Kind of curious.
One needs to recognize when good science is undervalued and have faith in decisions based on data. Rumor-mongers, if not armed with data, lose. People who use dogma ("goes down in summer", "must short in this sector") rather than data as a basis for investment lose. The intent of this thread, to defeat the arrogance, has been achieved. I know that some will find it ironic that the tool of choice was arrogance itself. Fast track, sorry.
We've learned that (1) there's a team at SI that does big cap well, (2) there's a team that does small cap well and (3) there are at least six or seven SI contributors that do both well. It's about even, scientists to non-scientists, among the "do both well" gaggle.
I'm not much interested in big caps and I don't do them particularly well.
Current status...... Miljenko has a hot hand. He worries that he's out of bullets, however. Please give him bullets. |
