Quote:
Originally Posted by lewdog
That's an awesome breakdown. Pretty good return this year for an account with individual stocks. Nice job.
Do you have accounts where you just own mutual or index funds?
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I don't have a lot of money in funds, so they're just in the mix. However, they tend to not be at the top or the bottom of the returns each year compared to my individual stocks, obviously.
Quote:
Originally Posted by scho63
Really nice diversification and well managed portfolio.
The only small bit of advice is to never left a stock loss exceed 25-30%. Once you start hitting the 40-50% or more level, the stock has to double just to break even.
There are other strategies for hedging to protect your downside when a stock rolls over.
That's it. Overall you did very well and congratulations.
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Yeah, there's a story behind each loss, though the bottom line is that they're losses. Some of the bigger losses are stocks that I like, and they just pulled back from big gains. Others have been on a slow bleed for a while and I'm divesting over time. Generally I like the stocks that I buy so I tend to buy and hold, but obviously that doesn't always work.
The main experiment I'm doing these days is chasing momentum. If I buy a new stock, I buy a very small amount of it, and then I only buy more if two things happen: it's up for me overall, and it's having a down day. Then I buy more. If I buy it and it loses money, I don't buy any more and may sell it off. For a long time I thought that if I liked a stock and it was going down, I should keep buying. That's nice for dollar-cost averaging if it goes back up, but it often didn't go back up. So I'm eschewing "value" and buying on momentum these days.
I'm kind of surprised that I seem to have done better than most this year. I figured people would ridicule me for trailing the S&P by 10 percentage points this year. I can't figure out who out there is beating the market when all of our different strategies didn't come close to it.
For that matter, I've looked to see in the past what stocks have led to the S&P results, and the math should be easier. But I can never pinpoint why I don't meet or beat the market in most years. I think it's more concentrations of stocks rather than picking winners.
One challenge in chasing momentum, though, is that a couple of my brokerages don't give me YTD returns, which annoys me. I have to look them up one by one. I also have a limit on the amount of any one stock I'll buy. If I go over that amount, that means the stock is doing well, so I just leave it alone. For reasons like that, I didn't even know that AMZN was only up 4 percent this year. It was over my limit so I was just leaving it be.