How the fuck is it November already

It feels like the last time I wrote something here, it was November 2023 and I was screaming MOOOOOOOON for SOXL/NVDA. 

In case it needed saying, NVDA is up 238% since then, SOXL is up 50% from then and almost 140% at the highs of the year.

And my portfolio.... is basically flat YTD, but up 44% since November, literally all because of that single trade. Call it lucky, call it skill, whatever.

I didn't hold, inevitably. I closed out the whole position at almost 40% return on equity, and ran for the hills away from tech. I went into small caps, TNA...at 25! It's now at 53! I closed at....yeah...42.

Money made. More money missed. Annoying. 

And yet that's how things work, there is always an opportunity to be made, and thus an opportunity to miss. You can't take them all.

Here's what went ... wrong? Kinda

1. For the last 2 months I have been quite sceptical of the market's heights and anticipated some downside. This expectation started slightly prior to the first carry trade collapse, which most have now forgotten even happened.

Back then, everyone was suddenly an expert in Japanese equities, funds and what a carry trade is - Investopedia must have had record searches.

Well suffice to say, it's not talked about now, but back then it caused quite the furore. I had entered short (with hedges), a week before across the indices. I knew that small caps would over-react the most, and so most of my energy focused on leveraged short RTY, with a smaller position short SPXL.

This combination worked brilliantly, I had closed my long TNA before this, having held for almost a year, and protected my equity with downside protection. As a result, I leaped ahead of the indices over the last 1Y.

But it came at a cost.

Once my shorts closed profitably, I began to re-enter long, correctly anticipating a market rise. The market rebounded incredibly strongly, it was great....until I saw that my typical measures of market breadth were reaching dangerous levels again. I use these measures, NDFI/S5FI/MMFI/R2FI, to judge whether the market is too heavily (or too errr .. not heavily), concentrated in a given index.

Once these measures hit 70%, I reduce my long exposure, and sometimes I short to hedge my bets.

In this case, I hedged my long exposure with SPXL shorts at a 40:60 short/long ratio, leaving me net long, but with reduced downside. It seemed smart - heck it sounds smart - but it was the wrong decision in hindsight.

Now all the indices have caught up, RTY went to ATH which had I just held my original thesis would have put me up almost 50% for the year, and it left me flat for the year. That's ok in a way, I have protected my gains from last year - but i can do that by sitting in cash, earning interest...

Now the crypto bro's are declaring moon, everyone can buy any piece of junk and it will fly 20%, they will make annual index returns in a single day and tell everyone how it can compound to a trillion dollars in a year using a compound interest calculator they found on Google,  or asked GPT to generate.

And I feel a little left out of all the fun. That's what triggers FOMO, but fortunately I have never been one to follow the crowd. I refuse to watch even a NFLX show, if I know it's currently trending or popular. It leaves me left out in social groups and conversations, but I have always preferred that. I can always watch it later, right?

Well, I learnt a fair bit. 

I learnt that you can have 1 single idea, have confidence and conviction in that idea, and let it grow exponentially. You don't need a million ideas, you just need 1. And then the balls to listen to it.

Still working on the last bit it seems....

2. The second bit that I suppose went wrong, is that I got bored. I took the eye of the ball. I doubt anyone actually reads this far, so they won't see me admit I am the most annoying spammer, shit talker ever. Especially more so recently. 

The volatility in the portfolio went to minimum when I hedged my positions, i was barely moving 0.5% a day, when I am usually moving at 2-3% on a slow day. This lack of volatility bored me. On top of that, I was growing a little annoyed at the market not quite declining to points I had expected - heck it still hasn't. 

So to distract myself from making foolish decisions, I downloaded some games, and I only used etoro to shit post - not that I didn't do that already. I tend to find the platform is filled with people whom do take themselves too seriously. Meanwhile, I am a completely unserious person - much to the annoyance of the one person on the broker whom has met me IRL and I suspect despises the fact she can't 100% guarantee when I am being serious or not. (Sorry).

But yes, I got a little bored and carried away in useless posts that were either hilarious to only me, or to a very select group of weirdos. 

Somehow tho, I have stayed above 500 followers, which is both not something I cared in the slightest about (I call them stalkers as I can't remove them), but also very amusing they don't leave. I wonder how many disabled notifications.

Poor copiers, they can't disable...I hope the money was worth it dude.