Well - i have several portfolio's and deploy different strategies with them. My portfolio related to most trades posted here returned a fairly mediocre 25% only, mostly due to my high average cash position of about 45%. In retrospect I should have gone 100% long and held onto my many winning stocks much longer, On the other hand, the strategy to take quick profits has provided positive returns of about 18% p.A with positive returns in any year but 2002, which I think is an OK return. I try to modify my strategy to hold some of my stocks with home run potential longer and hope that the wins will make up for the losers.
Going forward, i think that it will be much more difficult to make money with buy and hold, so i will stick with trading out of stocks I consider to be fairly valued and don't have home run potential. I will also stick with my FA quality criteria (another think that has humbled my return but would have saved me a lot of money in 2002). I have learned that there does not seem to me a simple market beating strategy that works in any given time period for me - what works well in one year may be a bust in the other.
Overall I have learned to ignore the market to a large extend, as I have pointed out before on this thread, i work to achieve an absolute return ,regardless of the market conditions.
FWIW I also do have a buy and hold portfolio, mostly in foreign equities, that has returned around 50% this year in US$ but over the last 5 years the return is less than for my trading portfolio and the volatility was much higher. |
