July update, and taking a breather

This is within a week of me finding high growth investing one year ago, back in the first week of August, 2018. As of this writing, it is Friday July 26, 2019. This is just a few days before the Fed cut rates by a quarter point (on the 31st, the day I posted this to the forums), but whose remarks sent the markets reeling downwards, at one point the Dow dropping over 470 points.

My last update was thread 54974. I have not published an update for May or June, as my portfolio underwent a lot of change. Frankly I was trying to find my investment goals and direction. A read through some of the threads regarding valuation would spell things out for me. The short story was I was taking on more risk than I have historically been comfortable with. Were the results good? Yup. But emotionally it was not a match for me. Or maybe I’m just burned out and need a break. I’ve spent 3 years on Stock Advisor (the last year with this high growth forum as well), recovering from investing mistakes that started 10 years ago. And recover I have. I’m now 30% above my glide path, as opposed to being, ahem, under my glide path. But I need to take a break for awhile.

For the second quarter of the year I beat my benchmark VOO portfolio by 3.89%, which is nearly double my target of 2% per quarter beat (my long term 15-year goal). Year to date I’m beating the market by over 20%.

Year to Date:


Month      Me       Benchmark   Beat    Monthly
01/25     15.6%       8.0%     + 7.6%    + 7.6%
02/22     26.0%      13.4%     +12.6%    + 5.0%
03/29     30.9%      14.7%     +16.2%    + 3.6%
04/26     36.4%      19.7%     +16.7%    + 0.5%
05/31     33.3%      12.3%     +21.0%    + 4.3%
06/28     41.5%      19.5%     +22.0%    + 1.0%
07/26     49.3%      23.8%     +25.5%    + 3.5%
YoY       29.6%       8.8%     +20.8%

Activity:

Holdings: (as of 7/29/2019)


TICKER  ALLOC.
======  ======
PSJ      19.9%
SPHQ     12.4%
PTF       8.2%
AIEQ      7.9%
PSR       7.4%
AMZN      5.1%
Cash      4.9%
PYPL      4.7%
TTD       3.3%
HQY       3.3%
SHOP      3.2%
OKTA      3.2%
QQQ       3.2%
WM        2.9%
MDB       2.8%
ZS        2.8%
AYX       2.4%
VOO       2.2%

I’m in 6 high-growth stocks, at roughly 3% each now. This is the trimming back I spoke about above. Months back I would have been at 2-3 times that allocation. Funds from those sales have poured into ETFs, below.

PSJ, PTF and QQQ are all ETF’s offered by Invesco. The QQQ is NASDAQ focused. The PSJ and PTF are software and growth tech focused. The latter two are actively managed and similar to the investing style done here, though with more companies than the dozen or so typically shared here. They are, however, good performers. In fact, my year-over-year gain of 30% roughly matches the year-over-year gain of either of those ETFs. It is not lost on me that all the work I did for the last year roughly matched either ETF.

AIEQ is something I’ve been in before, then out of, and frankly it fascinates me. It has not always been a good performer. But machine learning and automation is something that I’m knee deep in (and trying to get chin deep in), and lately the “Robot”, as I refer to the fund, has started to stage a come back from its poor performance. This holding is, to some degree, part vanity on me. :slight_smile:

So what am I doing next? Well I plan to reduce my stock holdings further and raise my ETF allocations, focusing on the PSJ and PTF funds mostly, and some into SPHQ and PSR. This keeps me in growth but without the single stock risk and allowing me to take a break and breathe a bit.

I’ll still lurk on the forums. I do expect to get back into stock selection at some point.

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