A Little Less Daytime Typing, a Little More Focus on Markets

Submitted By Trader Mark
Readers may or may not notice but I've culled back a bit on the posting during the day - maybe not noticeable but perhaps 1-2 less posts during the actual market hours. (I generally was doing 7-8 a day!) While these posts are generally quick to read through from your end, compiling data, sources, writing original content, cutting and pasting, highlighting, and then sourcing old data within the site takes a lot of time. I generally write 2-3 things during the night time or very early morning (6 AM) and then have them schedule to post throughout the day, but when I try to type things in the middle of the day it is quite the chore.

Since my performance has been disappointing to myself here in the past 12 weeks, I am making a little switch and keeping my "during the day" posts to nothing that takes longer than 15 minutes of 'typing, compiling, sourcing' - that's my goal anyhow. This will help keep me from straying from my main priority which is having a good track record, or at least that's the operating theory. Since August 2007, I've been doing very well but most of my older track record is only something long time readers are aware of since we switched tracking mechanisms at the turn of this year. So the last 12 weeks is making me look like the average fund dude i.e. mediocre. As I wrote a few weeks ago, these past 3 months have been the longest cold streak I can remember (granted I can only remember back about 5 years) :) Usually I only stink for 2-4 weeks at most.

And bottom line, to "Fund My Mutual Fund" I am going to need to have performance - I can write all the pretty words I wish, and be correct 98% of the darn time on my economic calls but that does not appear to be what attracts money.

I am very pleased with the initial results since I made this change a week ago Monday. Even with a huge stash of cash, and working on some intraday trades to supplement my core portfolio I've tagged a good 4% to my performance in just over a week in a flattish market. While retail investors don't really concern themselves with "risk adjusted" returns, the ability to do better than the market with far less risk is something that is highly coveted in the institutional world - i.e. even matching the market performance while having a lot of your money protected in cash is considered a very good thing.

Overall, we'll continue to post during the days - especially the trades but I am going to keep the posts simpler if I need to type them between 9:30- and 4:00 PM. And my more comprehensive pieces I am going to focus on writing at night or in the wee hours of the morning, and then I'll schedule some of those to hit during the daytime hours as well. Mix and match.

I've received a lot of emails on how the pledge count is going by those eager to get started - I have not done an update in a long time. Or I get the generic "when will you actually get started" - to which I give the generic "it's not up to me, it's up to when the money is ready to go from investors". At this time in 2008 I was getting $500-$700K a month and frankly thought I'd be up and running by early 2009 at the run rate I was going. $7M in pledges seemed like a cake walk, but then again I was beating the market by 30, 40% much of that time. So that combined with prescient economic calls was a heck of a combination. Unfortunately Sep and Oct 2008 then hit, and crashes like that seems to have chased out the retail investor - now we're dealing mostly with professionals, computers and seasoned individuals ... a different class of animal.

I'll do an update here in the next few days on pledges and update the latest totals.

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