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
