Aloha all, I’ve been lazy for a month without any addition to the blog. Gonna try to turn the ship around if I can.
When I started this blog earlier this year I summarized my performance for 2017 in my two trading accounts. I have an IRA that I call my speculative account and a taxable account that I call my conservative account.
For 2017 I made about 75% in the speculative account and about 35% in the taxable account, which I will now call my moderate account.
So now as we approach the end of the second quarter I am happy to report that since January 1st of this year I am up about 29% in the speculative account and DOWN about 6% in the moderate account
If you combine the accounts, I am up about 10% overall. My professionally managed accounts are up about 2.5% over the same period.
Some may ask why I don’t manage my whole account rather than put up with this meager 5% annualized return on the managed accounts? The answer lies in the divergence of my two accounts. If I did this and practiced what I do in the moderate account then I could be down 6% instead of up 2.5% on the bulk of our assets. There’s no guarantee I can duplicate what I do in the speculative account. Remember, too, that there are no tax implications in the speculative account. And besides, I’d have to go back to not sleeping at night.
I make too many daily trades to really document them here but over the last month or two I have pocketed some really good gains in $AMZN, $TWTR, $SQ, $TSLA among others. I went into this early quarter with both calendar put spreads and calendar call spreads in these names. Slowly I have sold off the put spreads and rolled the call spreads up. I am preparing to add some put spreads to all the names I am long now.
I’ve got two recommendations for the 2-3 people that read this. First the Animal Spirits podcast can’t be beat, you can find it here and here.
Secondly I’ve read Joel Greenblatt’s ‘The Little Book That Beats the Market’. Check out the synopsis on Amazon here, and it’s relevant website here.
As always, please comment! God knows I have 50 or so registrations a day, are they all bots? (Simple answer is yes, but why are they doing that?)