One Million Dollars!
That seemed like a lot just two weeks ago, when we did our September Portfolio Review but, as I said at the time, though mainly in cash, we had kept a very bullish set of "losing" position in the Long-Term Portfolio (LTP) as we expected the next stage of the up cycle to include our beaten down oil and materials stocks.
Boy did we nail that one! In just two weeks, our paired Short-Term Portfolio (STP) and LTP combo have gained $91,154 to bring our combined total to $1,112,035.60 - a new high and up 85% since our Thanksgiving, 2013 start date. Much more impressive though, than making 85% in two years, is making another 9.1% in two weeks!
We didn't do anything fancy, these are essentially the same positions we featured in our last Portfolio Review - we simply left them alone to do their thing - as we should be doing with our long-term plays. The key to our success was sticking with our strategy and our strategy included:
- Taking our winners off the table when we felt the market was getting toppy
- Evaluating all of our remaining positions
- Cutting the positions we no longer had faith in
- Adding to or adjusting the positions that remained to maximize their profit potential
Our paired portfolio strategy essentially forces us to buy low and sell high. By scaling into a diversified group of positions, including a healthy amount of market shorts at any given time - it's virtually impossible for at least some of our positions not to be winning in almost any market conditions. Then we simply cash in our winner and use that money to scale into our "losers" - if we believe they are only victims of a cycle moving against them - as opposed to having fundamentally lost something since our original investment.
