I have posted here more than once how I chose to go to cash in all investment accounts just prior to Liberation Day. It helped me earn somewhere around 55% last year when the two major indices earned about half as much. If I had simply stayed the course, I would have still had a good return, but only about half as much.
On the flip side, there was a significant macro opportunity immediately after the Covid shock that I was able to take advantage of. There was a law change that allowed anyone to claim a Covid 401k hardship withdrawal if their income was impacted due to Covid. Being in sales, my income was certainly impacted (honestly, by only 3% but it counted). I was able to take a 100k distribution from my 401k and indirectly roll it to an IRA - where I was able to invest it significantly more aggressive than I was able to do within my 401k - it was a macro opportunity that was not industry specific. That 100k distribution, a little over five years ago, is worth over 600k today; approximately 250k more than it would have been if I had left it in my 401k.
That is one successful strategy, but not the only one. I don’t care so much about individual businesses. I buy industries or indexes and I don’t fret about specific companies. Macro noise, as you called it, can harm businesses even when there is nothing that business has done wrong. Again, that is the entire point of this board - to discuss macro trends and risks. If you don’t care about such, then why spend such an inordinate amount of time here?
I did. I can’t give you the specific dates [edit: I guess I can as I was able to find those details below] as I changed brokerages between now and then but you can do the math on the total return of QLD, which I invested 100k on roughly 5/1/2020 (could have been sooner as the law made it retroactive to 1/1/2020) through today.
Then, compare the total return of SPY (analog for what I had in my 401k) over the same time period. That is the 600+k vs. the 250k I mentioned previously.
Additionally, here is one my IRAs around the time I went to cash last year. This is of course longer than a year but I only own index funds in this account - and the market certainly has not performed as well as I did by going to cash. Note the 93% return since March 4th of last year. The S&P is up 33% since that date and the NASDAQ is up 45% since that date. March 4th is the date I opened that account and I funded it with $317k in cash and two small index positions worth roughly 100k in total. On April 15th, I sold one of those small index positions and I took all the cash and purchased UPRO.
Here is my post from 2/12/2025 where I stated I was going to cash:
I proceed to go to cash in all self-directed investments (not including my 401k, which is only about 10% of my total investable assets so I left it alone).
Here is a follow-up post in that same thread I made on 3/10:
The rest is history.