Is there a case for celebrating a +0.5% return for July? Hell yes, after two months of “negative growth”. Also, thanks to the delay in posting this monthly report, I can already say that August looks way better than July. It feels a little strange to be the only one cheering for a market crash, but I guess what’s happening is giving me a little push in the right direction. A few days like today and I’ll be confident in starting to open BUY positions, reset the grid, and then we’ll be off to the races again.
For those who asked or are wondering, the reason I am not doing so already, it is that I do not want to even come close to blowing up the portfolio for me and for my copiers if I can help it. Leveraged long-short trading using a grid is dangerous enough even without keeping a hefty amount of cash in reserve. I do not ever want to find myself short of cash to extend the SL if I need to. As things stood at the bottom of this phase, when the $UK100 was at 8477 and I had the SLs at 8700, I still had some $10,000 in cash and therefore the possibility to take the SLs further up by quite a bit. This gave me the peace of mind to wait for the market to come back to me, and the space to reflect on what the best course of action going forward was.
Some time ago, one of you commented on a post: “If your total portfolio is net positive, why not just close most/all positions and start again? Being willing to take losses is a superpower (ignoring any perceived or actual prior promises made to your copiers).” I could indeed have done that and taken the hit, but I don’t have that superpower 😉. It would have taken months to bring the portfolio back to the level it is now, granted without any baggage, and in the meantime, the new copiers would have had a terrible loss. I elected not to cut and run, but just to be patient, and this is the approach that I intend to apply in the future too. It is important to me to make money for myself, for the long-term copiers, but also for those copiers that have recently joined the bandwagon and might have just been unlucky in their timing.
I’ll post a revised grid proposal in the next few days so we can have a good chat about it. For now, happy trading and talk to you soon.
Alex
💰 The growth for this month was $506 (+0.5%)
⏺️ eToro data
- Month Average Risk: 6,
- Month Max Risk: 6,
- Performance -16.46%,
- Copiers number: 606, -53 (-8%),
- AUM: $1,480,000.00 $1,850,000.00 (-20%)
- Portfolio value:
- Unrealised: $99,926.00
- Realized: $57,709.00
- Portfolio composition:
- Index: 65.48% ($UK100)
- Share: 3.5% ($SBSW)
- ETF 1.49% (SPLV, VNQ)
- Cash: 29.53%
⏺️ My data:
- Unrealised performance
- Total change: $506 (+0.5%)
- Weekly breakdown:
- W1 0.20%,
- W2 0.08%,
- W3 0.17%,
- W4 0.05%