Invite ye felawes and frendes desirous in gold to enter the gates of Shrewd'm, for they will thanke ye later.
- Manlobbi
Investment Strategies / Mechanical Investing
No. of Recommendations: 24
Marked "OT" as I didn't do that much MI this year. I liquidated my whole MI portfolio in mid March, and almost all my US positions.
My main trading portfolio had some big movements in and out, so I calculated the return this way: Total profit / average port balance through the year.
That came out at 19.3% return for the year.
I had a big cash allocation the whole year. Average of monthly ratio of (cash + Tbill)/port value = 69.0% cash. I wasn't using much leverage in the positions I had, though I have written some cash-backed puts which means a little of the cash wasn't entirely unrestricted/uncommitted.
Why the oddly good result? Two main reasons:
* I liquidated my MI portfolio and converted almost all my cash from USD to other currencies in the spring, before the US dollar fell so much. As with everybody, my year end results look 10-12% better measured in US dollars than they do measured in other currencies. For example, for anyone holding RSP (S&P 500 equal weight), total return for 2025 was 11.2%. If that person had a 100 euro banknote in his/her drawer, the return on that was 12.9%. A Euro based investor (or anyone else, for that matter) would have done better in zero-interest euro cash than in the average S&P 500 firm.
* The few biggish positions that I didn't liquidate did "perfectly" for Q2-Q4. I was net short Berkshire, long Alphabet & Dollar General & Dollar Tree. Rather surprisingly, Dollar General did better than Nvidia in 2025.
The alert readers may notice that I don't post any results the years that things go badly : )
My MI port, in the 12 months before its liquidation, was mostly LargeCapCash, which performed more or less as advertized: about 2%/year better than RSP which I use as a benchmark for it.
Jim
No. of Recommendations: 1
Hi Jim,
You mention the impact of currency on reported results, but you don't clearly state in which currency you are measuring to report a +19.3% return. I think it can be inferred that it is USD. Can you confirm?
I have not done my year-end report yet but measured in EUR, I think I am down 1%-2% so am probably up about 10% measured in USD. I normally go with the EUR result since that is my home currency.
Either way, you have nicely beaten me in 2025 so congratulations on a good result.
StevnFool.
No. of Recommendations: 8
You mention the impact of currency on reported results, but you don't clearly state in which currency you are measuring to report a +19.3% return. I think it can be inferred that it is USD. Can you confirm?
Yes, sorry if I wasn't clear.
The most meaningful view would probably be that it was 19.3% measured in US dollars, made up of a tailwind of 10.4% fall in the trade weighted US dollar, plus actual "global purchasing power" earnings of 8.9%. From that 8.9% I should subtract some sort of weighted average 2025 inflation rate among rich countries. That seems to have been around 2.8%, so a real currency-neutral return of around inflation+6.1%. Nice, but far from extraordinary.
I did a little better in my smaller secondary account, which averaged around 1/6 as big. Total profit in USD was 35.7% of the average USD account balance, while the average month-end cash allocation was 41.3%. No leverage, very few trades. A couple of big lucky picks, basically: most of the year it was just the same 3-4 stocks.
Jim
