whateverworks

Life After SLO - Part 2

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Whazzup? Not much -- especially not stocks. But neither have they continued to plunge drastically. My portfolio is still optimized to do well in a bear market and I've left it that way believing that the overall bear has at least a year to run. I did sell 2 of my short-ETFs, SSG and REW this month. I needed to bring my total ETF allotment well below 25% and guessed that the semiconductor and the tech sectors had already taken the biggest of their falls. In addition I sold QID (short NASDAQ). That leaves SKF (ultra-short financials) FXF (long the Swiss Franc) and SRS (ultra-short real estate) as my next bear-plunge short bets.

I also bought SIMC for my MagicMicroCaps fund and bought back FSTR for my former-SLO fund.

Overall, I believe that optimism over the election will keep the markets doing better (or less badly) than would otherwise be the case for the next few weeks or months. However, I don't plan to attempt playing the interim ups and downs as I would have done if the contest were still running with the end-date looming.

Instead I am taking the time to study currencies more. For example, UDN (a short-the-dollar ETF) has risen over the last couple of years but not as much as I would have thought. And compared to the volatility of the stock markets its progress has been steady as a rock. You would think it would fluctuate with good and bad news as much as the ups and downs of the markets (whose movements it mirrors).